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> 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 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.

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.

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".

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.

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).

> 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.