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Comment by dcchambers | Hacker News Reader

> US series are too long.

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.

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> However, the main issue with Netflix is that they are cancelling shows without letting them wrap things up.

That's rather the norm for shows; cancellation is a business decision, not a story decision. And cliffhangers are often a tactic used to as an audience retention trick when the team behind a show knows it is at risk of not doing well enough to continue, so it's particularly common (Netflix aside) for it to be used at the end of a season that turns out to be a shows last.

Yes, but it’s a norm from the broadcast era. I think the premise is that Netflix has an opportunity to do things differently, because a satisfying show on a streaming platform is not dependent on reruns to reach new fans.

> Yes, but it’s a norm from the broadcast era.

You think there is less competition and pressure to perform now than when there three broadcast networks and no real competing video services?

Why would you assume I think that when the rest of my comment is about the difference in valuing the long tail of streaming vs broadcast content?

Agree with this. They can atleast produce 2-3 episodes in a season and let the series come to conclusion. There is no need for doing 10+ episodes.

I wouldn't think season-finale cliffhangers are a retention trick - they are just that, cliffhangers, something that any tv series does episode after episode. Usually it's the lack of cliffhanger at the end of a season that signals it's unlikely to come back. Showrunners want to wrap up stories if they can; when it doesn't happen, it's usually because the risk of cancellation was not clear to them until too late.

Totally. Think of the timeline! By the time the writers have written the cliffhander endeing to the season, the actors acted, the directors directed, and the footage cut down into an episode, and then the episode aired, the writer at the beginning of the pipeline is so far removed from the end product that, while there's some notion of having the next seasons, the failure of the show doesn't hinge on the writer. Bad writing can sink a show, but good writing doesn't mean that a show will succeed. Thus the writer can't really A/B test their script like you can for a good/bad email campaign/website copy.

It's definitely a retention trick, but it's not a bad thing usually. Every episode ends with a cliffhanger. The season finale usually shouldn't.

The cliffhanger is a relatively recent innovation that is for retention. Episodic tv was just that, episodic.

Soaps have used cliffhangers forever and they are the definition of episodic tv.

Sure, but come on - Netflix isn't the same medium as Cable/Broadcast.

In cable/broadcast, the show was gone when it was cancelled. It wouldn't air anymore outside of re-runs (which rarely happen for cancelled series), and new content was designed to fill the space.

The whole freaking point of Netflix is that I can watch any item from their entire catalog at any time I'd like.

That includes all of those cancelled shows.

So as a user, I'm left in a really weird spot. I want the content that was cancelled, but I'm much less likely to watch a story based show if I know it was canned and will never be finished.

Basically - I'd argue strongly that Netflix is (intentionally or not) drastically undermining the long term value of their catalog by not allowing shows to conclude.

That's not to say they should fund a show forever, (it's still a business) but it does mean the intelligent thing to do would be to fund out some sort of conclusion or ending to those cancelled series.

A 2 season show with a 6 episode "conclusion" instead of a season 3 - That's something I would probably pick up and watch: I know it's a complete story and will have some sort of resolution (good or bad).

A 2 season show that was canned on a cliffhanger? Will NOT TOUCH. Fuck that. Doesn't matter how good it is, doesn't matter how much I like the genre - It's not a product, it's an unfinished waste of time.

There's now this unfortunate catch 22 where people won't bother watching shows for the first 2 seasons in case they get cancelled. Which means there's less audience, so they're more likely to get cancelled...

There is no catch-22. Usually those decisions are made well in advance. The OA from the article aired in March 2019 and was cancelled in August.

You appear to be saying that the cancellation decision was made in a vacuum, without considering viewership. I don't believe this to be true.

My point was that the viewership might have been low because nobody wants to watch the first season until they know the third season at least is being made to avoid being cliff-hung. That is the catch-22; third seasons are not being made because people don't watch shows until they have a third season.

>You appear to be saying that the cancellation decision was made in a vacuum, without considering viewership. I don't believe this to be true.

No. Viewership was low, so it got cancelled. If it got cancelled before airing then a low viewership would be a result from that. But that's usually not the sequence.

If that is the catch-22 you could apply this to a 4th season aswell. Or 5th.

Shows don't get renewed during or before a season. At least most of them don't, so it's always a gamble.

This is true, but it's not my problem as the viewer. There are many more shows I'd probably enjoy than I'll ever have time to watch. I'm not going to prop up Netflix or other corporate backers that repeatedly fail to respect their viewers by not wrapping things up reasonably neatly.

If there was enough doubt about whether a show was popular enough to be renewed that the production team didn't know whether to wrap up neatly in a potential final season, there is probably enough popularity left to justify making a mini-series or "TV movie" to finish things off with some closure for viewers. I've known a few shows do this over the years, and IME it almost always gets a favourable reaction from fans and reflects well on the show and those behind it.

It’s like any other modern growth company - they are a machine optimized to hit a small set of metrics.

TV networks had an incentive to hit 100 episodes for syndication. Netflix wants you to sign up, and knows that the friction of cancellation will keep you subscribed long enough to get whomever their KPI hit/bonus.

It depends on the show of course, but there is a middle ground. For example, both The Good Place and Glow were canceled but their last season finales work well enough as series finales. I have no trouble recommending either of those. Of course, it's harder with some shows.

The Good Place wasn't cancelled to my knowledge, but it wasn't a Netflix produced show anyway, so I'm not sure it's relevant.

> The Good Place wasn't cancelled to my knowledge

Yes, it was.

> but it wasn't a Netflix produced show anyway

Which is orthogonal to the point of raising it as an example of how a cancelled show can end in a satisfying way.

If by cancelled you mean "ended", then it was cancelled. But the reporting at the time by the network and the creatives was that they decided in advance of writing and filming the fourth season that it would be the final season (and that the approximate length and arc of the entire show was worked out years prior to be around 50 episodes), and so the ending was written deliberately as a series finale, thus making it not an example of what the upthread people are talking about.

As the other commenter pointed out, The Good Place, like Schitt's Creek, had planned arcs that naturally concluded.

Many broadcast shows that are constantly on the bubble write their season finales to double as series finales in case they don't get renewed, see for example within just the past 2 seasons: Brooklyn 99 (cancelled but renewed by different network), Fresh off the Boat, Lucifer, Single Parents, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Lethal Weapon, Star, The Orville (cancelled by Fox, picked up by Hulu, cancelled by Hulu but given final season pickup).

Makes sense. I had read that The Good Place was canceled which actually surprised me a bit as the finale seemed like a pretty natural ending. Of course, that's not to say that the showrunner would have turned down a longer run but the whole show is one of the better things I've watched of late and felt just about the right length.

The Good Place completely wraps up its story at the end of the 4th season. There's nowhere else to go there. It's very satisfying.

It's not an incomplete show like, the Santa Clarita Diet, for example (which I'm still mad at Netflix for cancelling, it was just getting really good and ended on a cliffhanger).

If The Good Place was 'cancelled' (which I'm pretty sure it wasn't), they were at least told in advance of the 4th season and were given the full season to finish its story.

Unless Michael Schur was sugar coating it, The Good Place wasn't cancelled. They had reached the end of the story they wanted to tell and ended it.

Here's an article about it: https://netflixlife.com/2020/09/28/why-did-the-good-place-en.... I know some other sites report that it was cancelled, but even on the The Good Place Podcast, no one really talked like it was being cancelled versus reaching the end of the story (and not jumping the shark).

I was under the impression Netflix canceled most of their shows after the second season because by that point contracts have to be renewed and renegotiated: it just cost too much vs taking their special sauce and applying it to a whole new show with new actors that are cheaper.

Only if a show hits it out of the park do they continue beyond the second season.

This is likely correct. Here’s an article that explains their cost structure.

https://deadline.com/2019/03/netflix-tv-series-cancellations...

The trouble with this is that after a while, people stop watching anything made with their special sauce at all.

We were late to the Netflix party in my household. We got it to watch a few big name films and shows that we weren't so keen on that we were going to buy them on disc (which we did, and still do, for "keepers").

When they started making their own shows, I watched a few, but nearly all of them ended up disappointing either immediately or after jumping the shark within a season or two. The words "Netflix Originals" are now a synonym in my mind for "probably won't be worth it, let's watch something else". Frankly, I don't even bother scanning that list on the home page for stuff to watch any more, unless I'm looking for a specific show that I already have reason to think I'll enjoy.

> Netflix isn't the same medium as Cable/Broadcast.

No, it's a newer integrated content & delivery service that’s far less diversified as a whole business than the corporations that run traditional cable and broadcast, so the pressures on its content to succeed in driving metrics are even more intense.

> A 2 season show that was canned on a cliffhanger? Will NOT TOUCH.

A seasons show that got canned on cliffhanger wasn't getting touched in a way which would justify the cost, anyway; they are writing in off and stopping lighting money on fire when they are cancelling it.

They don't want to invest the kind of money they put into these series for something people already committed to the platform might try out, the expensive, heavily promoted at launch series need to be drivers of the decision to subscribe or stay subscribed (there’s plenty of stuff that’s cheaper, less promoted, and probably fine for them if it's essentially catalog filler, but that's not the series that get attention.) And if it's not doing that, throwing another (even truncated) season’s worth of money to slightly boost it's value as catalog filler might make some artistic sense, but it doesn't make a lot of business sense.

The problem is that currently their content is a mix of their own shows and a lot of successful and complete shows made by other networks. As they move to having more of their catalog be their own shows which stay around forever it increases the ratio of cancelled shows to complete shows which if not carefully managed I feel will damage their brand over time.

You didn't address the parents main point at all. It doesnt actually matter that few people watched until the end.

I can obviously only talk for myself but can say with confidence that if I'm watching a series which is cancelled without a conclusion, the likelihood of every watching another one by that publisher is miniscule at best.

It's definitely the worst business decision to do for Netflix. Either don't stop at a cliffhanger or do a final episode to bring it to an ending. If you decide not to anyway... Don't expect people to come back after getting burned once

Because at least I sure as hell won't be back

> I can obviously only talk for myself but can say with confidence that if I'm watching a series which is cancelled without a conclusion, the likelihood of every watching another one by that publisher is miniscule at best.

Every “publisher” in TV series does it. And most of them, including Netflix, also pick up things other houses have cancelled without a satisfying conclusion and extend them to provide one, or at least another chance at one.

The only substantive difference I see with Netflix is that they are taking far more shots at potential tentpole series than any other single outlet.

> Don't expect people to come back after getting burned once

I expect Netflix has a lot better behavioral data driving decisions than your “I can obviously only talk for myself” and then drawing conclusions from that to what is “definitely the worst business decision to do for Netflix” as if you were the whole market.

> A 2 season show that was canned on a cliffhanger? Will NOT TOUCH

I think that you are almost-but-not-quite hitting another problem of binge consumption patterns that I think might be very central to the problem of Netflix show cancellations:

If I'm a long term subscriber and I'm used to bingeing finished shows: will I even want to start a show before it's concluded or would I rather wait a few years and then watch it completely? Inter-season gaps are bad enough in broadcast, but with season-bingeing they extend to >11 months and that's just not very attractive.

If Netflix isn't excellently careful with what subsets of their data they look at this effect might blindside them very hard: are people maybe not starting S2 because they loved S1 so much that they'll deliberately not switch on S2.01 upon availability but would rather start with rewatching S1 it in its entirety once S3 hits? This information is not in the tracking data, better focus on intra-season dropouts. Success metrics can be hard.

> Inter-season gaps are bad enough in broadcast, but with season-bingeing they extend to >11 months and that's just not very attractive.

It's also a completely different time frame for the binged show. A weekly released 10 episode season that would have occupied your mental space for around two and half months before returning nine and half months later might now be something you engaged with for just two days before not thinking about it for a year.

There's a reason so many streaming shows need to have season recaps, because in the year or two it takes for the next season you've completely lost all the story beats. As you mentioned, I find myself wanting to rewatch the previous season(s) before a new one kicks off, but that becomes really onerous with 10+ hours per season.

I don’t understand something about showbiz.

Tons of fans of shows like The Tick and Limitless have wanted it to continue. They would watch it, and so on. Someone made a decision to pull the plug.

Similarly, I have never seen anything other than gushing reviews and can’t-wait expectations of the Cadillac Ciel since the 2011 pebble beach show, but then the company never produced it, instead creating some sort of coupe. The Ciel was only ever seen in that Entourage movie.

The phenomenon of not listening to the fan base is real. But here is my question...

WE ARE IN THE AGE OF DECENTRALIZATION AND DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE. Why not have a platform where people raise money for shows, and whatever budget that is, the show makes episodes for it? Like Patreon meets kickstarter, or Patreon with a loan component for future shows.

That way, the only way a show would get canceled is if it went bankrupt and was unable to pay its loans from its Patreon-like revenues.

More generally, some company has the infrastructure (which is centralized for now, like Netflix) and we have to rely on it being magnanimous enough to let the public have a say. Teams to create shows come together as gigs anyway. We explored using such business models for software back in 2016:

https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-contributi...

But today, can’t you just use the Web multicasting for publishing/streaming the end result, or hosting it on some networks as a commodity hosting, and then production of the show would be funded using cryptocurrency?

How expensive would it be to acquire rights to a Netflix show that was canceled? Why would they not simply give it away for some equity in the new crowdfunded show? It would be like IPOing a show after piloting the first couple seasons. It would become a business model.

Why would this not work to bring back fan favorite shows, and create communities around them too? Why do we NEED centralized stuff like Netflix AT ALL?

I think you're significantly underestimating the amount of money that would need to be raised and overestimating the amount of people who would put their money where their mouth was and fund multiple seasons of these shows. Serenity, the Firefly movie, was sort of this, and it cost a lot for a two hour movie ($39M per Wikipedia) and didn't do a ton of extra revenue over that budget ($40.4M).

If there's something structurally preventing it, it's that the big studios and especially the "streaming as a loss leader" stuff players Amazon and Apple TV are making so many big-budget/high-production-value shows that audience expectations and standards are very high.

So then just release episodes less frequently, like Moffat’s Sherlock, without sacrificing on production quality. Yeah the cast gets older but if the fans really wanted, they would click the button to recruit friends to pay recurring fees to it.

After all, I’m simply saying make a Netflix but where the amount of minutes you watch to the end determines how much you want to allocate from your payment that show. You have a chance to fix up the allocations before the end of the month, when they are committed.

The decision is taken out of the producers’ hands and instead of cancellation past some political threshold, results in slower episode velocity.

"Get paid more slowly for doing less work" doesn't sound appealing from the perspective of any of the people who would be doing the creative work.

Doing it a "netflix but pay based on what you watched" isn't the model you need, because the shows that are getting canceled today would need disproportionately larger payments per person. Since they have fewer viewers.

So unless those fewer viewers are willing to put up substantially more money, the people making the shows are going to keep looking for other options too.

(You also have big startup costs for this enterprise, if you're trying to do it as a platform vs kickstarting a single show. Think Quibi-style user-acquisition-problems, but not your pitch tp users isn't "short episodes on the go" it's "we pay creators with a different methodology.")

Ugh, Moffat's Sherlock, despite having very few episodes (about 12), was dead in the water halfway through because it turned into Moffat's trademark LOST-style garbage string along of ever less sensical unresolvable plot twists

And reported budgets don't include marketing. The rule of thumb is that a reported $40M movie will have $40M spent on marketing, so if you hear a movie broke even, it really means that it lost an amount equivalent to its entire reported production budget.

Twin Peaks is (or, was) exactly this: "A 2 season show that was canned on a cliffhanger". The third season went in to production 25 years after the cliffhanger ending. The show was very much still worth watching even before season 3 became reality. A cliffhanger ending is still a kind of resolution and is not inherently bad.

There are 2-season shows with no ending or clearly rushed endings that are still worth watching: check out Party Down.

Does any kind of sloppy ending make an entire show worthless or is there some cutoff screen-time that makes it acceptable? Consider Game of Thrones. Are seasons 1-3 still worth watching even though 4-6 are mediocre and 7-8 are dumpster fires?

Totally seconding Party Down. That was such a funny show that I think ended too soon.

Consider Game of Thrones. Are seasons 1-3 still worth watching even though 4-6 are mediocre and 7-8 are dumpster fires?

As someone who enjoyed the show for a long time and watched it all the way through, I'm not sure the answer to that is obvious. They wrecked it so badly in the final episodes that I don't currently see myself doing the marathon rewatching thing with it. I'm also not sure I'd recommend it to a friend who hadn't seen it, knowing it was setting them up for such a huge disappointment.

You got burned because you watched S7 and S8 and you have a grudge against D&D. But S1-S6 developed many good characters and plotlines, and it's OK leave a world in progress. Especially in GoT world which is all about treachery and turmoil -- the idea of a tidy ending for everyone is absurd, unless everyone dies. So someone new knows to watch only S1-S6 and it's a good show.

But S1-S6 developed many good characters and plotlines, and it's OK leave a world in progress.

Some people don't mind that. Personally, I enjoy stories with closure. I find it a huge downer to know the canon ending sucks and will ruin the plot for many characters I have been following.

If nothing else, skipping the final episodes means I have to decide when to stop watching. In the case of GoT, the end of season 6 is one possibility, but arguably the worst shark-jumping happened after The Long Night in the middle of season 8 and watching that far does resolve some of the other plot lines.

My position is that the problems exist well in advance of season 8 but that in seasons 5/6 it still felt as if there was enough runway for things to land safely.

This turned out not to be the case. Partially due to creator disinterest (by some accounts, HBO was essentially pushing to give them 10+ seasons with generous budgets) and partially due to a writing style that prioritized "big moments" over character/world building and consistency.

I think this is best exemplified by Arya's "House of Black and White" arc (light spoilers) in season 6. The arc setup is that the Faceless master tells her constantly "To become Faceless you must discard your identity completely -- become no one" while Arya secretly refuses to discard the literal symbol of her identity (her sword, Needle, hidden near the temple). This tension is then essentially just ignored and seemingly forgotten for the entire arc which ends with her being accepted by the master as a Faceless Woman (as "no one") while also maintaining her identity as Arya Stark (by keeping Needle). Nothing in her story ever refutes, upholds, or explores this contradiction. Like many other potentially interesting things, it is brought up superficially (possibly by accident) then lost in the shuffle as the show rushes to the next "big moment".

> cancellation is a business decision, not a story decision.

Some series get resurected after years...

Cold Feet series 6 in 2016 after 13 years...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Feet_(series_6)

> That's rather the norm for shows; cancellation is a business decision, not a story decision.

I agree. But to my way of thinking, it's a decision with short-term and long-term business impact.

Longer term, it makes me less interested in starting to watch a series produced by that company, because of higher odds of ending up frustrated / disappointed. And it reduces the likelihood of me continuing to subscribe that service or recommend it to friends and family.

I also wonder what the impact on leaving a series unresolved has on its long-term syndication revenue.

Of course I'm just speculating. Depending on the actual numbers, perhaps those long-term downsides are completely acceptable.

> cancellation is a business decision, not a story decision. And cliffhangers are often a tactic used [for] audience retention

Series can very easily "jump-the-shark" and go on far longer than they should. There's a beauty to having something just "END" rather than go on until it needs to be cancelled because people are sick of it.

The Walking Dead, for example, just keeps going on and on and on. 9th+ season now, they're just re-cycling themes they've already covered 2 or 3 times. I guess they want a "sure-thing" but FFS, I wish they would place more value in trying out new things which, after all, is what really brings in the audiences when it works.

Sure, but there's middle ground.

The ideal would be for the people actually running the show to be able (and willing) to decide, "We've got enough material in us for two more seasons, then we're done. We want to wrap it up there." and the network/Netflix suits to say "OK, then you get two more seasons. Make 'em great."

Very slightly less ideal would be for decisions about whether there will be, for instance, a season 4 to be made at the beginning of season 3, so that the writers can design season 3 to be a final season and wrap up loose plot threads.

> cancellation is a business decision, not a story decision

Of course, but I'm not sure you can entirely separate them. Story decisions impact customers, who impact the business.

> That's rather the norm for shows; cancellation is a business decision, not a story decision.

But if the series wasn't so long, each series would be commissioned as a whole and production in the can. That might not protect against unresolved cliffhangers, but it does mean you don't lose a story mid broadcast.

This is why I decided a few years ago to not ever even start watching new series. I hate the cliffhangers; I hate the one-episode-a-week shit; I hate the split seasons; I hate the waits even when the series is probably coming back. Best to wait for something like Breaking Bad to finish its entire run, and read how everyone liked it, including the ending, and then start watching the first episode. There is an overwhelming amount of good content from the past, more than I will ever be able to watch.

ALTHOUGH. Rick and Morty hooked me anyway. Love that show, and so pissed at how long it took to finish out this past season when it was delayed.

I though that episodic tv was on the way out and that arc's and mythology where more important.

Episodic tv takes skills to do properly, in this day and age. People now expect even side-characters to be fully fleshed out, and that’s difficult to do in a short amount of time. It’s also clear that a lot of “hot” showrunners, while great at building suspense and devising cliffhangers, are actually pretty bad at ending stories, so a more serialised approach allows them to kick the can down the road (e.g. Lost). After all, you become famous by generating interest and expectations, not by actually fulfilling them.

Put another way, what's ruining Netflix isn't the cancellations, it's the obsession with extremely long serialized soap operas over good episodes, miniseries and seasons.

R&M has subplots but episodes are basically self-contained, so it tallies with your stated preferences really.

Exactly, if you take a look at HBO, they always announce either from the start that the production is a "Limited Series", or pre-announce the year for a final season. This gives the writing team the bandwidth to properly conclude all of the main plot lines.

Maybe this is because HBO values their content and hopes to syndicate it, whereas Netflix values their new subscriber counts.

OMG! A three season arc, where everyone knows at the beginning that that's the extent of the series, is perfect. Netflix has the perfect platform to put up the money to have great talent and production sign on for a short run series like this, much like the Brits do.

I couldn't agree more!

Renewals are just as important to them. They are not one of those companies that relies on your apathy to keep subscribing.

> This gives the writing team the bandwidth to properly conclude all of the main plot lines.

I remember watching Lost (the TV series) and getting into this around Season 3, and I remember hearing them saying they were "waiting to start telling the ending of the story". I found a recent article [1] talking it in more detail:

> "There were all of these compelling mysteries and so we were saying, ‘We wanna have this stuff answered by the end of Season 1, this stuff answered by the end of Season 2, and then the show basically ends after about three years.’ That was the initial pitch, and they were not even hearing it. [....] they [ABC] were just like, ‘Do you understand how hard it is to make a show that people want to watch? And people like the show? So why would we end it? You don’t end shows that people are watching.’”

You can't keep dragging out the mysteries forever, you have to eventually resolve something. You also can't just keep introducing new ones forever, because it doesn't make sense. You can't keep showing the same flashbacks, and you just can't introduce major new chunks of history to people's backstories that have never been brought up before.

[1] https://comicbook.com/tv-shows/news/lost-ending-original-pla...

Agree. Netflix should follow the Korean drama model if they know shows need to stop after a season or two.

Almost every korean drama is a one season story arc, and they're some of the most watched shows in the world.

I'd still take a bad season two of some of them though :D

Sometimes I feel like Netflix takes an idea that was pitched as a movie or 1-3 episode mini series and asks the creators to stretch it longer. If they aren't going to commit to finishing these things, write in arcs that wrap up enough that a second season is possible but not horribly annoying if its not.

This goes both ways. Writers clearly set things up that way in the hope this will put pressure for more episodes, but cliffhangers are just really bad writing done against rather than for the plot. Hopefully cliffhangers die thanks to streaming and the risk of non-renewal!

That said, I like how Netflix handled sense8. The plot was clearly getting more and more absurd and season 2 had a massive cliffhanger for season 3. Then it was cancelled - but still they produced a final somewhat absurd but satisfying movie-length final episode that tied all lose ends. That was probably a contract term and not perfect, but it worked out better than a third season or no end at all.

Good cliffhangers work with the plot, using a limit like a weekly release schedule or break between seasons to lengthen tension. I would say most American television is really bad at this and likes to create fake tension between episodes that otherwise has no impact on the plot.

No, cliffhangers are not bad writing. It's a literary technique like any other.

100% this, even if they did a 1-2 episode wrap up on cancellation it would alleviate most of the problems.

The problem with this is that the per-episode cost of a 1-2 show terminal microseason is much higher than the normal per episode cost, because you've got to pay people to come back for it and give up the opportunity for other work (or work around their replacement work, which also has costs.)

That's a good point, but I wonder what's the cost of leaving shows completely unfinished in the long run. I know that I'm very unlikely to start watching a show if I know that it never reaches a satisfying conclusion. This in turn might create some "dead inventory" for Netflix, shows that people are reluctant to start watching because they're unfinished.

Although there's cliffhanger and cliffhanger. Santa Clarita Diet for instance technically ends on a cliffhanger, but it's a last minute event that's supposed to introduce what they thought would be the next season. If you ignore the last scene basically every important plot thread up until that point is either wrapped up or at a status quo, so it's not such a terrible place to end a show.

An other recent example is The Boys: while the show did get renewed for a third season the ending of season 2 could easily be a show final, you'd just have to get rid of the last couple of scenes introducing a cliffhanger for season 3.

Conversely you have shows that clearly couldn't wrap their storyline in a satisfactory way before they were canceled. GLOW is unfortunately in this boat.

>GLOW is unfortunately in this boat.

Don't really agree. No, you wouldn't choose to wrap-up the show that way but it's a fairly natural break point.

I agree that it's not the worst but it definitely leaves a lot of interpersonal drama unresolved. It makes the effective ending very bittersweet, which might indeed be fitting for this particular show.

I loved the ending of Farscape, even before the mini-series wrap-up.

First, they wrapped up essentially every dangling plot-line. Everyone was safe, everyone was happy.

Then in the last minute of the show, out of no where, an alien no one had ever seen before swoops in and disintegrates the main characters.

"To be continued" flashes on the screen.

The series was canceled before this episode aired/was finished, and that's how they chose to go out. Could have just cut the last 30 seconds off the episode and called it a wrap, but nope.

An alternative solution here is to not cave and fund content in the old broadcast style of "run a show until it doesn't make money".

You could instead make intentional decisions to fund miniseries and content with clearly defined "endings".

I'd much rather have 6 episodes of a genuine story with a start/middle/end than two seasons of character development and a cliffhanger ending.

> You could instead make intentional decisions to fund miniseries and content with clearly defined "endings".

Netflix funds plenty of original miniseries, movies, comedy specials, and other close-ended content. But the high-risk, high-reward, could-be-tentpole series get an understandably-large share of media attention.

I guess if someone were to donate enough money for this it would be possible

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