Netflix is creating a problem by cancelling TV shows too soon

Weeds Season 1 was amazing, the rest not so much. Dexter, season 1 should have just been a single season, sooo good, after a while you wonder how many serial killers reside in Florida. Billions, season 1 amazing, it hasn't been too bad after, but after a while it just starts to seem forced.

Do I have news for you...

Like Walking Dead with top-notch production value.

I don't watch Disney content much but I own their stock because they really know how to milk every drop from the franchise. When they can't milk no more, they wait few years and they restart. With young audience it's just endless source of new minds to corrupt. It's like junk food for the mind.

Glow is one of the latest instances. They paid the actors for season 4, but never produced season 4. It left with a very unsatisfying ending.

Will I ever recommend anyone with Glow on Netflix? no, because I can't tell them "Hey, watch this show on Netflix, but it doesn't have an ending and likely never will"

It's similar to how I'll never recommend The Kingkiller Chronicles or a Song of Ice and Fire. Because doing so would mean that someone reading those would probably never have an ending.

This is where I feel Netflix is hurting themselves. They're producing all this content and then never finishing it. Their catalog is going to start looking like a bunch of incomplete shows.

I think it's fine if you have a show with a short run. One season that finishes properly? Great! Two seasons? Great! but ending before it finishes is just as bad as continuing on forever with no end goal.

Not a huge fan of SW but Mando gave me the feeling of wonder about the universe that the OT gave 11 yr old me when it ran on a Sunday special. So there is at least one point I beg to differ on.

There's a difference between stories told with a self-contained timeline on their own terms (a la Fleabag), and having the rug pulled out from under something that isn't resolved.

"Content" is to series, movies and films what "grub" is to good food and fine dining. When creators say "content", they in a way degrade the quality of their own work (they should sell it as the equivalent of good food or fine dining, not as "grub"); when those that watch just call it "content" they probably don't have a very deep connection to it: So much better when the viewers come away from something and think of it as a story, and experience, a show, rather than "content".

I am very annoyed with shows dragging on endlessly though. I very much like Babylon 5 for precisely this reason: it told the story it intended to, and when the audience asked for more content they spun it off into other shows/movies.

In general, I would say that 5 seasons is a good maximum, and that you better have a good reason for going longer (e.g. adapting a book series to TV, where each book is a season).

But maybe what Neflix needs to do is add more "100x" developers to make the user interface even more polished, and that will bring the users in... /s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24618541

Many shows run too long, yes, but that feels orthogonal at best to the reasoning for Netflix cancellations. Especially as they go and do the opposite with many longer shows that they deem "worth" running into the ground.

Basically, your reasoning seems like a discussion to be had, but I simply don't think that's the conversation happening within the Netflix content team.

I switched over to watching shows from Asia where the format is basically only one season by default, it rarely goes to two, and there is a logical beginning, middle and end that follows a proper story arc. If the show was good when it ended then watching it remains a great memory. I've enjoyed so much stuff over the years and it's never let me down like the Western model does.

Just as a simplistic example, user set A wants content `x` and `y`, user set B wants content `y` and `z` - data shows that `y` is popular, but by removing `x` or `z` they make those users very reluctant to continue using the service.

I've seen it multiple times with services I use where only the common set is kept and then people start loathing and leaving the service.

Users failing to recommend shows on your platform to possible new users because they were canceled without a resolution. “The OA” is perfect example. Netflix won’t make another dime off that show because anyone that has seen it will adamantly steer people away and anyone that googles it and sees it was canceled on a cliffhanger will have zero interest.

Shows don’t need to run forever, but they need to finish them. If that is 1 season, fine. If that is 6 seasons and a movie, great. But I’m not interested in a show that just stops airing without an ending, just like I’m not interested in reading a book where the publisher just stopped printing chapters at some random point.

Syfy is another source I now avoid, after what they did to Dark Matter (criminal) and The Expanse (saved by AMZN).

To be honest, even if the show stays strong, you start to hit the 6th and 7th season of 20x1hr seasons and I've probably lost interest. I know there are people who would be happy for their favorite shows to just keep going year after year because they're old friends but I'm not one of them.

IIRC American Horror Story had increased viewership in the 2nd and then again in the 3rd season, but it did eventually go downhill. Ryan Murphy shows are also pretty weird though, it would be nice to see the seasonal anthology format in broader contexts. I'm optimistic about the Haunting of Hill House series but that's again horror.

Lost was a watershed moment in many ways, even though JJ Abrams couldn’t stick the landing. They rushed out the DVDs of season 1 about a month before the season 2 premiere, giving people time to binge the whole show (even the pirates). As long as the streaming services keep the back catalog around, you can always catch up. I have forgotten which show, but there was a network show I stopped watching because they only had the last six episodes on their app. Once I fell seven episodes behind, I didn’t want to keep going, having missed a chunk of the story arc.

There’s a certain level of curiosity for a show that has survived, say, six seasons. They must have something there if they keep going. Maybe I should check it out? Especially if I’m out of other stuff. But is it going to have a satisfying final episode, peter out, or end ina cliff hanger? The more seasons, the higher the likelihood for a wrap up. Two season shows almost always end abruptly.

I'm probably one of the guilty people who are generally happier with bite, or at least light meal, sized content.

This actually would be a perfect fit for me - I noticed that it became off-putting for me when I see that show has more than two-three seasons. I'm not sure what changed because it wasn't like this before - probably it's just my increasing age and number of accumulated experiences from books etc.

This is only true for modern TV formats that favor season+ long story arcs so much that any individual episode often contains neither the start nor end of any particular plot and is entirely meaningless outside of its larger contextual role in the series.

In old-fashioned TV, each episode pretty much had to stand on its own as a story and stood a much better chance of hooking new viewers. The downside of that approach of course is that status-quo is God and almost nothing truly interesting ever happens because of it.

The best shows, in my opinion, manage to mix these in a way such that any individual episode can be interesting even to someone who has never seen the show before, while still creating a larger more interesting narrative over time. My personal gold standard for this is Stargate SG-1, which lasted 10 seasons and started with human beings walking through a wormhole to encounter the monster-of-the-week and ended with them zooming across the galaxy in starships and fighting ascended would-be-deities.

Maybe the statistics bear out that season n + 1 has audience <= season n, but I don’t really think that way at all

- Viewers watching shows costs money to pay for networking.

- Producings shows cost money.

- Consumers pay the same amount regardless of how much they watch.

Sort of like a gym membership, the ideal Netflix customer never actually uses Netflix. But, of course, if Netflix had no shows and someone didn't use it at all, they'll eventually cancel the subscription. If Netflix were the only game in town, then its incentive would be to produce the fewest, shittiest (i.e. cheapest) shows they can and have its customers watch just enough to not bother canceling.

But now that there are other subscription services, they have to compete against them. Customers can and do pay for multiple subscription services, but there is an innate limit to how many it makes sense to have in parallel: your watch time is finite.

I witnessed this in game dev when MMOs first got big. There was a big rush where every game company thought MMOs would be the next big thing. But almost all of them died, because it turns out even gamers who love MMOs can really only afford the time to keep up with one or two. The market was a lot more competitive and limited than they realized.

This is less true for TV shows since there is less social interaction and need to "commit" to a show than to a game. You don't have to worry about leaving your guild behind, etc. But there is still a limit to how many shows a person can watch, which means the marginal value of adding another subscription goes down very quickly.

I think that's the main thing driving Netflix's strategy. They aren't trying to earn customers so much as they are trying to starve competitors and claim territory.

To claim territory, what they want to do is soak up as much watch time as possible. If people are constantly watching Netflix shows—even if they barely enjoy doing so!—it makes their other subscriptions less utilized and thus less valuable.

Given that, I think it makes some sense for them to just throw a ton of shit at the wall and see what sticks. Their main goal is that is to have something just good enough to watch show up in a search result when a viewer is trying to decide what to spend their evening on.

Of course, none of this incentivizes telling meaningful, important, gratifying stories about the human condition. But Netflix, like every large corporation, doesn't care on whit about that. They turn human attention into shareholder value. The fact that they happen to create films ("content" as they say) to do so is mostly incidental, in the same way that cattle ranchers happen to buy a lot of corn.

You're skipping over something really important about these shows.

Build up and word of mouth. If either of these series' seasons dropped all at once, I'm 100% certain they wouldn't have been nearly as big.

BB Season 4 was the absolute peak of "what's going to happen next???" for the internet communities I was involved in, my family members who were watching, my friends who were watching, casual chats at work. There was suspense in waiting week to week and discussions carried on while we waited.

Netflix releasing episodes all at once has completely destroyed momentum and build up. With everyone watching at their own pace, there's no collective presence. The episodes might have your mental space for a couple days/weeks while you binge, and then it's gone, and people who are also interested are going to be on different timelines.

You're less likely to recommend the show to others 6 months later, because you literally haven't watched or thought about it for 6 months.

I like AppleTV+'s move of doing weekly episodes. Everyone is on the same page again, and you get to share something together.

There weren't that many multi-season shows that I loved and had a decent ending - usually it gets milked to death that main actors quit and then either show cancelled (Castle) or get a new actor and suck (x-files).

Some shows have awful resurrection - 24, I loved the entire thing except for "reboot" and last season.

Some shows have honest writers, BSG reboot was clearly getting too convoluted and had to be ended before it cancelled.

Some shows try to pivot to tumbler fanfics for content - Supernatural. Which was dumb because people were interested in such stories were already watching it.

> If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers.

That doesn't always top factor. Some shows can generate money outside of screen - merch. That's how supernatural stayed so long.

First, in the age of binge watching, people might be specifically looking for shows with tons of episodes/seasons out to sink their teeth in.

Second, some shows take a while to "warm up" and get the word of mouth out before they catch on. Some shows might be dozens of episodes in before they become wildly popular. You say that Breaking Bad and GOT break the dynamic, but I think it's far more common that very popular shows do so after they've been out for a while.

Third, with episodic formats it doesn't matter if a show is long running, people can jump in or out at any given time.

Fourth, people might enter your target demographic over time. You say that the potential viewers of season 3 are the viewers of season 2, but what about a new batch of viewers of season 1? Let's say your demographic is young adults. Every year you have teens entering your target demographic, and you could count those as potential viewers of your show. And again, on the age of the internet, is dead easy to start viewing a show from the beginning at any time.

The stuff that's relying on being dense and literary, with an overall point being made, tends to need to get the job done within a few hours of runtime. 6-12 hours, like you say.

Your working hypothesis is that Netflix is willfully trying to keep people from spending more their platform?

It seems like every shows' got an idea. And then once they get funding they start thinking through the details. I know it would be a lot of ask and probably expensive but people write novels all the time. Netflix could break the mold by looking for stories that fit something like 24 chapters / episodes and having a complete 'thing' at the end of it. The could then have the arc of the story to work with and just produce three seasons of content to spread the risk.

I know this one won't bother many people but I particularly hated their depiction of the bounty hunter droid, which was orders of magnitude more competent than any other droid in the universe. Droids in star wars aren't immaculate AI like other Sci Fi. I hated that they used this as a plot point.

I doubt they would, it's seems opposite to their business model - try to beat the odds w/ lots of content and A/B testing everything.

Netflix seems to be sitting in an awkward position between YouTube and HBO. They need to pick winners to compete w/ HBO, and production/licensing costs have to be cheaper to compete w/ random YouTuber producing hours of content.

edit: it's also purely a matter of opinion, but I got a lot more pure enjoyment from the US version of the Office than the UK one. They had more time to develop the characters and figure out what was truly funny about the show. Sure it devolved into sentimental fan service in the last few seasons, but at it's peak I was laughing way harder at the American version than I ever did for the British one.

Netflix just pulls the plug. This means you get a weird kludged together final episode to try to pull stuff together or they just leave it and there's no resolution for a lot of stuff.

I do agree that many of these shows would be better if they were written in the UK style. A lot of US shows now just feel woolly as they meander through the plot.

Inspector Morse (et al) come to mind as one that lasts longer. So many great British detective shows that go on for decades, with around 20 movie-length episodes per season (aka series).

Same with The Simpsons — the 8 year peak of seasons 1-8 means at least we got those episodes. I haven’t watched a new episode in over 20 years but revisit the early episodes often.

I like the sandwiches on my favorite restaurant’s menu. Them serving the pasta dish I don’t like doesn’t make the sandwiches worse.

I don't. This might be true with dramas where the plot is a big component of it, but certainly not for episodic comedies.

Yeah, the Simpsons isn't something I care to watch anymore, and the Office's final seasons without Michael Scott weren't as good. But I'd still much rather have more episodes of content I enjoy than less for the sake of "the complete package". It sucks when a show gets cancelled without an end, but while we're here, the American Office had a fine ending and I'm much happier with the many seasons of it over the British one.

If The Simpsons was British, none of the best episodes would have been made.

UK Office is a concise and witty comedy idea expressed in the correct amount of time the idea deserves.

If you look at the later seasons of shows like US Office, Parks and Rec and similar shows, what you're watching has more in common with a soap opera than a sitcom. I feel I can almost count the exceptions to this on one hand.

A Series consists of one or more Seasons. A Season has episodes.

That's why I thoroughly enjoyed the German show Dark. They planned 3 series/seasons and that's what we got: a well-thought-out show from start to finish with a single vision of how the whole thing will end. That clue in the first episode? Yep, directly related to the ending in season/series 3 and not some, now inconsequential, detail the writers 'forgot about' or changed course over.

Netflix isn't even remotely close to that point, they're still looking for places to drop cash by helicopter.

Instead of cancelling outright, they should guarantee each production an extra half season to wrap up at a minimum. This would reverse the damage to their brand.

You can use data to justify any argument you can imagine that fits that data.

Not really an A/B test, but you can certainly from internal data see how individual viewership of cancelled shows (or even break it down to shows cancelled with and without closure, if you take the effort to have someone code shows for that) correlates with downstream retention.

For the reputational stuff, I'd be very surprised if they are not using one or more of the consumer survey services to track that and the role decisions like cancelling series in general or in particular play into it.

This reminds me of Battlefield 3. The designers of Battlefield 3 used data mining a lot to drive their decisions, particularly around multiplayer weapon balance. For a long time the competitive players said there was a balance issue with the M16, but the designers were adamant there was no issue because they didn't see any particular issue in the data. The M16 was used a bit more than the others, but it was also the weapon everyone started with and had unlocked. So they thought everything was fine.

Then, after quite a while, someone made a video clearly highlighting the issue. And then the designers finally took a closer look and found that gosh darn, there was a bug in the weapon stats. The M16 did not get less inaccurate when you got hit, unlike all the other weapons.

So if you equipped a M16 you were significantly more likely to successfully return fire, compared to the other weapons. Like an order of magnitude. Which significantly increased the chance of surviving the firefight if you were a moderately competent player.

Of course the competitive folks had figured this out quickly and predominantly used the M16, but they hardly made a blip as a percentage of the total player base so it didn't really show up in the stats.

>please don't string it out for 7, 8, 9 seasons

Especially historically on broadcast TV, there were a lot of incentives all around to continue to milk a cash cow with a core audience who would watch it for the next 20 years given the opportunity. In addition to the networks, I'm sure many of the actors and others involved in a long-running show realize they'll probably never have as good a meal ticket again. So screw artistic vision.

Most of the new shows are between 8 and 12 episodes about an hour long.

However, that's not really what the article is about. The shows mentioned are 8-10 episodes per season (both the canceled shows and Stranger Things).

This is more about Netflix throwing shows against the wall so fast they never get to see if any of them stick. Which is silly - many of the best shows out there took a few seasons to hit their stride. Look at season rankings for Seinfeld or GoT - few people rank the first season of either as the best.

Like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are shows that should've gone past their 8th season. The Office should've never had those abysmal last two-three seasons. That '70s show should've never had those abysmal last three seasons.

I always like it when creators and producers recognize when a show has run its course. This is why we have good memories of Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld stood to make something crazy like 5 million per episode if they had done a 10th season but he knew the show had run its course and ended it on a high note (something, btw, that was a plot point on an earlier episode).

Same with Breaking Bad, they knew that they had a story to tell and that it didn't need to drag on and they delivered some of the finest 5 seasons of television drama that one could ever ask for.

I generally agree with you. However, the main issue with Netflix is that they are cancelling shows without letting them wrap things up. Letting shows die on cliffhangers or when the cast and writers are finally getting into a groove. This does nothing but cause turmoil amongst the fan base and some of Netflix's most dedicated, paying customers.

If they set out from the start to wrap things up in 2-3 seasons and let the writers plan for that, it would be fine. As of right now, they let writers build up massive plots in the first two seasons only to pull out the rug right when things are getting interesting.

It's the same with a lot of computer games. I remember i loved to binge when i was younger but when you are older than say mid twenties 50-70 hour games just annoy me. A good example of this is a game like Witcher 3, pretty cool game but just completely endless - frustrating for a person who also has a lot of work, family, friends etc. You never feel accomplished, its a stale feeling, and you don't remember half the plot because you don't have time to play 10 hours a day.

Short series/seasons can limit what you can do. Which means by show 8, you know there will be a falling out that reaches climax at show 10.. cliff hanger.

Shows like glee hung on too long but it gave them space to make unexpected story lines... split the season in two..

In theory.

In practice, I note that the UK version of The Office was 2 6-episode series plus 2 Christmas specials, for 14 episodes total, while the US remake ran for 201 episodes, and it's the US version that people seem to re-watch endlessly around the world, despite its very rough start.

My goto example for this: House of Cards. The original is so much less long-winded.

Nobel, a Norwegian show was like this as well, 1 season and it was great, no more was needed. If there is another season awesome but nothing is lost plotwise.

These are all shows I found via netflix.

Why do you have to commit? Watch an episode or two. See if you like it. If not, move on.

First of all, most streaming shows are 10 episodes per season, 12 at most.

But as for the number of seasons, what's amazing about television is how deep and intimate your knowledge of the characters becomes. The kind of emotional depth and resonance you get with characters in the 4th and 5th season of a show is simply unparalleled -- we know their life histories, and the smallest of scenes can shake us with the amount of meaning they convey.

If you think of Mad Men or The Sopranos or The Americans or Breaking Bad -- my god, each season is better than the last because it's like they approach infinite richness. The last seasons get to levels none of the first seasons were able to.

Also, it's a huge rarity for shows to make it to 7–9 seasons. The ones that do are because they're hugely popular and people want to watch them. If Game of Thrones had still had books to work off of, I think pretty much everybody would have loved 3 or 4 more seasons.

5 seasons, each covering a specific topic (politics, drug dealing, media) beyond telling the story, and when they ran out of topics and told the entire story they had, they just wrapped it up... they could've easily milked it and made 5 more meaningless seasons but luckily didn't.

For a planned multi season story arc Babylon 5 is the best example I can think of. The story arc was planned from the beginning and they stuck to the plan. The temptation to keep piling on more content to a successful show is huge.

For multi season story arcs I think it's important for Netflix or whoever is making the show to commit to the whole thing regardless of early ratings. I'm far more likely to take a chance on a new show if I know the story line will be completed. I don't want to start watching a show only to find out they cancelled it in the middle of the story.

My two all time favorite TV shows are Fawlty Towers and The Young Ones. Each consist of two 6 episode seasons. I really wish there were more. (though honestly, they did exactly what they set out to do, mic dropped, and the rest is history)

There is no actual reason that Dr Who could not do longer seasons for example they had to commit to hiring better writers and to develop them.

And yeah, the biggest issue is that Netflix is giving shows only one season, and usually a cliffhanger. It also kills off a lot of shows before they have a chance to get good: Star Trek is notorious for getting good around season 3 of any given series. A lot of iconic television wouldn't have ever existed if it was cut off because of the quality of their first season.

I will grant though that when they try to replace main characters it can go to crap (Scrubs, sort of The Office, personally I also grew tired of Game of Thrones early on) but I'd much rather have more of a good thing than less

I never enjoyed the US version as much and lost interest after a few seasons.

Despite incredible earlier seasons, have also failed to finish many others, including 24, House of Cards, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, etc. Just end it!

It came to me a few years back after watching the remastered Star Trek TNG, later an early season of Game of Thrones. Even though TNG was given plenty of time to hit its stride and had some incredible episodes, another half were just crap. Meanwhile early GOT season would have ten decent episodes in a row. The difference in average quality was striking.

Of course, GOT had the benefit of being mostly written beforehand, similar to Babylon 5, one of the first series to break episodic containment.

TL;DR: TV show law - A dozen or so episodes per season is the limit of a writing team. Produce any more than that and they are guaranteed to be phoned-in filler.

Why can't you just enjoy a one or two well done seasons? Season 1 of Barry on HBO was basically a perfect story. Season 2 wasn't terrible, but it was stretched and didn't really add to what had been a perfect capsule. Patriot on Amazon, was also a brilliantly plotted two season arc, and though I love the characters I admit to push it to another season would be to take away from it not to add.

Viewership costs money, so if a show cannot attract new users or retain current ones, you might want to throw away that viewership.

I think this is half of the problem, too many shows being made with the hope they get enough traction to stretch out a few seasons. The result being not much of story and/or any hope of a satisfactory ending.

No surprise that viewing figures tail-off as this becomes a predictable path?

- first season doesn't pull enough viewers, it's cancelled.

- first season pulls enough viewers, season 2 onwards take season 1 as a status quo they'll basically never advance from, advancing the story so slowly that it almost feels like a sitcom where most characters end up at the exact point they used to be at the beginning so they can keep getting viewership.

I'm starting to see it with The Boys for example (WARNING slight spoilers next) Season 1 introduced a super dangerous environment where any wrong step could end the characters lives, by the end of season 2 it almost feels like a high school show because the main characters mostly bump into each other without consequences. If they need to kill someone they just introduce a new person a few episodes earlier so they can get rid of that one while the main characters stay healthy.

That's not to say Netflix won't be out-competed by bigger players, but media creation is probably more correlated with organizational competence, and less correlated with pure spending power than many other industries.

makes total sense, they will throw things at the wall and see what sticks, quickly replacing them with the next big shiny thing, and drop it quickly as well. Repeat.

It said that shows sometimes, do not get traction immediately.

I suspect that might been the case with "The OA" for example.

I watched first season only because my wife wanted it, and to me it was just some weird "mindbending newage" stuff.

But second season the show went into a mix of sci-fi and fantasy, and started to have interesting mysteries, characters, better plot, and give impression that something was going on after all.

SPOILER: first season the show implies the main character maybe, maybe not, is some kind of spiritual entity. second season is clearer in the fact that the main character actually is a person that can travel between dimensions, and the finale make clear the show will be about the protagonists and antagonists chasing each other across dimensions. A "dimension chase" plot sounds much more interesting than "maybe I am an angel" plot. So when the show finally had the chance to bring in a wider audience, it got killed.

And I vehemently disagree with the notion that "almost all shows get significantly worse". There are definitely many shows that do jump the shark at some point and significantly drop in quality. On the flip side, there are many examples of shows that needed a couple of seasons to find their tone and really hit their stride which they most likely never would have had the chance to do at Netflix. E.g: Parks and Recreation, Community, Justified, even Breaking Bad imho.

I don't even understand the point of this question. Why is 90 minutes more worthy than 48 minutes? At the end of the day, I have a little bit of time to relax. I generally do so by watching one episode of <whatever series the wife and I enjoy atm>. What is it you think about a 90 minute movie makes it more worthy, that anything less than it isn't worth doing at all?

If I cancel Netflix the only way I am going back is if they stop cancelling shows. Whats worse is Netflix will be full of a graveyard of shows never finished. If the last time a show has been updated is over two years back I dont click to watch.

Amazon had the better idea to plan for the long term not the short term. I hope Netflix takes a similar stand. Make your customers happy and eventually your shareholders will follow when the numbers work themselves to your favor.

Netflix wants to bring in NEW customers... Existing customers are unlikely to unsubscribe, but getting new customers is hard at this point.

Best way to get new customers is to throw new shows at people, lots of them, get them hooked. If people join, again, unlikely to leave -- they will find other cool things to watch.

For Netflix, the value if a new hot show is way higher than season 4 of a very hot show... Nothing short of GOT (mid seasons) would be good enough to make it to season 5-6... I'm shocked some if these Netflix original series are making a 3rd season, since 2 is usually all it takes to milk a franchise

However, there are a ton of good live action shows that were canceled like Hasan Minaj’s, Altered Carbon.

Just too expensive and not worth the money? But in comparison to animation no live action will be.

In comparison, I can't say for sure that The Witcher series is super high quality, but it managed to be pretty exciting and I enjoyed it for that.

On the other hand, if quite a few people just prefer to watch the version with a white man, that seems like it would correlate to the shows being cancelled, independently of how entertaining they are..

Dragon Prince is one example. Cute show, but very in your face.

Old 80s sitcom Dinosaurs, ran into the same problem. Later episodes often made you feel bad. Not the best for a comedy show.

You can agree with a stance, but you don’t always want it shoved down your throat.

Oh look every cast member is a different race/ gender/ orientation. Oh great, but is the show any good?

I enjoyed "The OA" and "Snowpiercer", I really enjoyed "Devs" and "Watchmen". I don't mind female characters. I don't mind non-white characters and I don't mind non-straight characters.

But I get really annoyed when they seemingly shove those things in my face just because "yay diversity!".

Have the main character be gay or black or whatever, but if it's not relevant to the story, just treat it like a matter of fact and have them act like real people.

If wikipedia page views are a good proxy, glow ranks even worse than OA. Haven't watched either show personally

https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&pl...

Shooter was a USA Network series, not Netflix.

From what I understand, Netflix' decision model is heavily based on how many users watch the first X minutes of a season in the first few days that it's up. Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.

I'm sure this is a data-driven decision, and I guess it shows that novelty is probably what drives people to the platform and gets new subscribers. It makes intuitive sense: with most forms of media the largest number of people will give something a try when it's new, and aside from very rare exceptions the viewer base will settle in to a much lower number of "true fans".

So it makes sense in the short term from a business perspective, and they have way more data than I do from my armchair, but I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.

I suspect Netflix would have to see increased churn due to pressure from competitors to see more serious attention paid to loyalty and retention.

Over here in Germany, I always thought it was mostly driven by literary critics, prizes, book fairs, etc. and thus its own sort of niche although I have no idea how well that works. Is that different in the US?

I really don't think this started in the 1990s. The tension between commercial needs and artistic purity has existed for as long as there has been art[citation needed].

Some more modern art forms like TV and Film are very expensive and so particularly sensitive to commercial interests but it has always been true - artists have to eat just like everyone else.

This is an absolutely fantastic point and applies in more contexts than that of publishing. You absolutely must be editorial in what you present to people who are higher up in the decision process and are less able to interpret the data. It often isn't just the money people, it is also your bosses and their bosses. It is a matter of presenting things with an eye towards the best possible outcomes, and understanding where things would get confusing for someone who is only half paying attention.

One could argue 'Money people' tend to be the source of many of our resources misuses (water,land,air,etc.) Of course they'll use data to shit everything up.

They know their place. They look at spreadsheets all day long, and they see that some money losing piece of culture is preventing the business from creating non-money losing piece of culture ... or making payroll.

>It started with the chain bookstores. Used to be, getting in was the hard part, but once a writer got published, he stayed published.

It was great for the writer that got published, but not so great for countless others who couldn't get a break and couldn't get into the vaunted 'club' of gatekeeping published writers.

>Then there are the literary agents, who don't even read 99 percent of the work sent to them

Because there are magnitudes more writers, than writers who can generate an income, and always will be. This is the long-tail that everyone was predicating at the advent of the web. Democratization of culture and media means that it will be much harder for most (except for the tiny few) from making any sort of living from it. You see this on Instagram, YouTube, Twitch streaming, and podcasts because the barrier of entry is so low, it means there are hundreds of thousands of people trying all the time (and those that fail at making an income, are replaced by fresh young faces willing to try). But it's also true of more traditional media, like publishing.

>I'm not surprised this is happening to Netflix

Neither am I. Every single series that Netflix invests means they have to pass on countless others. There is no other way to run this business. The funny thing is that early on with Netflix, when they did not have a lot of content, they would keep renewing unpopular series forever. As they ramped up production, they followed the same trajectory as traditional network channels like NBC/ABC/FOX.

But what you're talking about is essentially the innovator's dilemma. Following the available data can lead to short-term optimizations, but also getting caught in a local minima. The silver lining is that this creates room for new competitors who can skip around that neighborhood in the business model and find a new kind of success.

So my question is the same whenever this sort of criticism comes up: if the current companies are screwing up so badly, who are the innovators that will go around those mistakes and out-compete them?

I'd say the 1690s, beginning with John Dryden's subscription-only translation of Virgil. Otherwise on point.

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...

Netflix invests in series by pioneering new narratives for niche markets. When a niche market is smaller or the serie is received not as expected Netflix pulls the plug as every rational agent would do.

The publishing industry in the 90ties was optimizing their business model for maximizing ROI of limited amount of shelve space by producing hits for popularity what 80% people like.

https://wistia.com/learn/marketing/science-behind-why-we-bin...

Generalizing people in to a category of money people and expecting to draw a profound conclusion from your arbitrary box is underwhelming.

Capitalism is the most efficient way to allocate capital and produces much more culture than systems driven by altruistic motives.

I think that the "one person who knew literature" system is largely a myth. People who "know literature" often resort to promoting the same canon and authors of the same background. I'd wager that a random lottery would produce a more interesting, dynamic, and varied list of books than one curated by a single expert.

If you truly want unrestrained creativity, then organizations like NEA need orders of magnitude more funding so they can throw cash at people trying to make something new. That will produce wild, interesting, and experimental works. But it won't produce Mad Men or other kinds of works that promote polish over boundless creativity. It is a trade off.

I think this is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. They do know their place: it's making money. The problem is that in our corporate market-based economy any culture producer that does not relentlessly focus on profit and scale will be outcompeted and destroyed by one that does.

Corporations are incentivized to hand the reins to the money people because the larger market structure means they will die if they don't. The market quite simply does not give a shit about the long-term well-being of a society. That doesn't factor into the fitness function at all.

Sure, it's bean counters. So then go a step further, and ask yourself: why are the bean counters afraid to take risks on fresh creative content? What market forces are driving them to bet solely on licensed shlock in the post-2000 world? What changed?

If the publishing industry is overwhelmed with a flood of writers--it very much is--well, please ask "why." Dig into the reasons behind the indie author gold rush.

There's a great in-depth recent history of the publishing industry here: https://www.wattpad.com/869503247-so-you-want-a-fandom-publi...

Quick and dirty summary:

Amazon opened its floodgates in 2009, when it offered 70% royalties. Traditional publishing gives authors somewhere around 5% royalties, when all is said and done. That is how the gold rush started.

As for publishers betting on tried and true best-sellers... that started earlier, when several laws in the 1980s caused a major consolidation of businesses, including publishers and booksellers. A law got changed, and Barnes & Noble became the arbiter of what got shelf space.

There is a lot to this history.