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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

I think that at somepoint Google will find itself in a position TV stations found themselves in around 2008-ish; TV stations had created the habbit of cancelling everything that wasn't an instant hit in it's first season. In turn this became a self-fulfilling prophecy because people wouldn't watch the first season. They didn't want to be left out in the cold with some season 1 cliffhanger which was never resolved because the series never got renewed for a second season.

...AND YES I'M STILL PISSED ABOUT FIREFLY!

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This issue will impact Netflix as well. During lockdown I watched a few series that were at season one only, and a lot didn't get renewed. Now I only select series with at least two seasons.

Almost as bad is when they blink at the contract table and move some franchise to another streaming provider while you're in the middle of watching it.

Netflix has certainly got into this position for me.

With Netflix I feel like it's the opposite even - you have to just force yourself to stop watching any of their originals after 2nd maybe 3rd season at most because it always, inevitably ends up deteriorating in quality massively. I don't know or even have a theory as to why that happens, but so far it has held true for me.

Here's my theory!

Perhaps the writers write the first season fully aware of the probability that they won't be asked to write a second. Then, when it's a surprise hit, they are less sure of what to do following the events of the first.

AFAIK, Netflix decided that they only were going to make 2-3 seasons at most, and only locked up talent for that long. Therefore, some behind the scenes changes after season 2-3.

I don't know whether that's still their assumption.

+1 for Firefly. At least they kind of finished it with the movie. I'll always be a browncoat.

Currents (G+) is over 10 years old.

TV shows stopped doing season cliffhangers, which is good.

According to @killedbygoogle on twitter[1] it's not 10 years old.

[1] https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle/status/149184004005339136...

Currents used to be "Google+ for G Suite" but Google+ shut down in 2019 so it was renamed to Currents at that time. I don't think it was over a decade old though, that sounds like a previous product also named Currents that was shutdown prior to Google+ for G Suite being a thing.

You might be thinking of the old Google Currents, which was a completely different product (a "digital newsstand" app) with the same name.

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