Netflix has created a self-fulfilling cancelation loop with its new shows
forbes.com
forbes.com
Look, I know there are financial considerations at play for production companies and all. But at some point you gotta be willing to either commit and do something all the way, or not do it at all. This half-assing isn't helping anybody.
This isn't just Netflix either. My big fear now is that the "Wheel of Time" series will be cancelled before the entire story is told. Which makes me very reluctant to start watching it. And if other people are also reluctant to start it for the same reason, that's going to hurt the viewership... which makes it all the more likely to be cancelled! You can't win.
Didn't that happen because they completed the published books and had to figure out the rest on their own?
(I never read or watched either one, I just vaguely remember hearing something like that)
The final two seasons of GoT are an absolute mess but at least some of the blame has to go to George. D&D did a fairly excellent job adapting the story when they had the books to work from and only truly went off the rails once they had to start trying to tie things together from vague notes from GRRM. They certainly bear some responsibility as well, but it's hard to fault them for failing to finish a story that the author himself just can't seem to get a handle on.
I say all this with great sadness, but that's how it seems to me.
Looking at this analysis on Reddit, GRRM mentioned this particular piece of trouble multiple times over a 5-6 year period ( https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/2pp2m8/spoilers_all... ).
The crazy thing is that, based on what we saw in the series, much of the Meereen plot _doesn't even figure into the endgame_. I'm sure George has bigger plans, but Daenerys in Meereen seems to be at best the run-up to where her plot ultimately leads in the books, and yet George is spending years and years adding dozens of characters and solving a knot of plotting that seems like a sideshow! How he'll ever get to the point in his remaining lifespan is beyond me. The man is 74. Even giving him an extremely generous 20 more years of life, he's just not on pace to finish the series unless something changes very, very soon.
Meanwhile he's writing back story for Elden Ring, working on a series of TV shows, writing lore books and prequels to ASOIAF. Sadly the dude just seems to have lost the steam required to take it to the finish line.
It's extremely sad as ASOIAF is legitimately great.
I guess the real lesson: unless their name is Brandon Sanderson, do not start a partially completed series.
Is he even working on it anymore? It looks like he is spending his time on numerous unrelated projects these days.
ADWD released in 2011. Even at his glacial pace it's hard to understand how he could still be working on it if he was consistently dedicating hours a day to writing. It's not like he hasn't produced anything in that time either, so yeah, probably just not working on it much at all.
For the first few seasons yes. Not so much in later seasons (even way before the books stopped). They also changed many things that were not supposed to, for unclear reasons.
I'm a big fan of those last two books but can see how they'd be tough to adapt well, especially for a show that exploded in popularity like GoT did.
I think the issues with the next books come down to deciding:
- how the Army gets south of the wall
- how far south they get before encountering defeat (IMO they are the big bad, and if they don't make it down to the heart of the Kingsland slaughtering everything into a near-unstoppable horde, then the entire literary point of them is meaningless)
- how to plausibly defeat them
The failure of the TV series to address those three macro tension points to the whole series was the essential great failure of the series. They are the existential dread, they are old testament retribution for all the human sins on display in the series, they are nature's revenge for our failings as a species. An extinction level event where it's not just you dying, it's everyone dying. Really they are cold-to-the-bone fear that you're supposed to feel.
At this point why GRRM doesn't simply hire people to ghostwrite for him and he executive edits the final books is beyond me. There are fanboys likely of great writing ability and talent that would happily contribute for contracting money and not care if GRRM shovels the novels out the door with only his name on the finished product.
Idk though. He's described himself as a "gardener" when it comes to writing. I'm not sure he'll be able to prune things down to where he needs to to finish.
Another tinfoil hat theory of mine is that the reception to the end of the series has put extra pressure on him to bring home all his plots in a satisfying way. It would definitely be a strange feeling to see some of your major plot beats happen in an unsatisfactory way before getting to release them in book form.
The first two seasons were interesting because people were in the thick of it and their deaths were prior to their plot arcs reaching even their midpoints. I understand the books were more sprawling. But the show was very simple by the end.
Big Co: let’s acquire this beloved series for $X00 million.
…
Big Co: ok writers, feel free to completely ignore the content we just paid endless riches to acquire and change it however you’d like.
…
Big Co: strange, the fans don’t seem to be as excited about this content as we expected!
They never should have made a WoT show, it was obvious from the start that the books are built on values which don't fly in modern media (particularly, gender essentialism.) Instead of butchering the story to make it comply with modern values, they should have simply written their own story. But of course the sort of writers who get hired for jobs like this aren't good enough to write their own stories. Companies think they can cheap out when hiring writers if they buy an IP that already has fans, and dumpster fires like this are the result.
Indie TV is coming for them. There are already stirrings of fan made short series whose production quality can stand toe to toe with most of the AA dreck available now. Many of these are made by a single person with a vision and the 3D modelling and animation skills necessary. Their main limitation is in acting talent but style transfer will quickly put that in their hands.
Just put the setting 100yrs after the last book and suddenly you can have a society innit that fights against gender roles etc.
Ive stopped watching TV the series in the second episode but I'm pretty sure I could've kept watching if they hadn't butchered the original story so much.
I work in the industry and the above poster is mostly right. Executives buy IP for the sake of association marketing “Watch the adaptation of the best seller series”.
BUT the industry suffers from a dearth of competence. If you work in the visual arts or make creative work in some way you would be familiar with the process of ‘uglification’ where a client with no creative taste gets to destroy the work of a brilliant creative through an avalanche of notes and changes. The creative might want to protect their work but depending on your ability to protect it, they might not.
‘Uglification’ happens in the film/TV industry all the time. People with little knowledge of film history call the shots and they have terrible taste. The result is they hire bad writers, bad directors and produce poor output. And that uglification pipeline is how adaptations get destroyed.
In example:
Executive who doesn’t know anything about “Wheel of Time” owns rights. He hires a writer who doesn’t know anything either. Writer reads the book, doesn’t like it, decides to use it as a platform to write whatever he wants plus he also needs the money. He gives it “a modern spin”, executive likes it. Executive then hires hot advertising director who’s no good but is hot in LA. Director hates the books, thinks it’s dumb but sees it as his big opportunity to break through into narrative film. Everyone involved now doesn’t care about the original books at all, and thus they will do whatever they fancy.
It goes on and on and what you get at the end is mush. Unless someone at the helm - director, writer or executive - is absolutely resolute that he wants a good adaptation, nothing accurate will come out of it.
I don't buy it. There are no "darker patterns" just a lot of out of touch LA / NYC writers, and marketing execs who need to sell whatever dogshit is being released this week.
The way the stoicism of Lan was just trashed in the tv show means I wont be watching season 2 or 3 or any of them!
Big Co buying 100's of Big name IP titles / options... BIg Co has no real plans for the IP
Big Co has lots of screenplays not attached to any Big Name IP
Big Co randomly pulls Screenplay Y, and tells screenwriter to make this "into a This big Name IP" and slaps the Big Name IP title on it...
So many of these movies and shows have soo little to do with the original source that they have to been imaged as wholly new properties, but then retro fitted with the name slapped on to an existing property because Hollywood is completely adverse to any new thing, it all has to be a reboot, squeal, or prequel at least in title.
Reality is more like:
Big co buys a big IP because they are excited to sell stuff to that fan base
Producers scurry around trying to find people to attach to the project
If they find a good director and/or team of excellent writers who are genuinely passionate about the source material, they are worried the artistic vision will frighten the exec producers and fat cats funding the movie.
If they find big name writers or director, that person frequently wants to make their mark and doesn't care much about the source material. If they can't find big name writers or director, the people they get are second-rate and can't help but butcher the source material whether they care about it or not. After all a film/series is very different from a book/book series and so some changes/adaptations have to be made to accommodate the new medium.
Along the way the project drifts while different stars and funding fatcats are attached to the project causing writes/rewrites, additions, changes etc. Later the project drifts when people see rushes or tehre are test showings etc and they decide rewrites or reshoots are needed.
It's very seldom that a talented director and/or team of writers is given a genuine chance to produce something true to the original source material. I mean if you think about Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson, prior to LOTR they were most known for writing and directing a pretty non mainstream horror movie. The sort of risk-taking that it takes to greenlight them doesn't happen very often.
Example: I'm a huge Star Wars fan.
But I don't much like RotJ.
Or Episodes 1-3.
Or Episodes 7-9.
Or a lot of their other properties.
(Clone Wars is amazing, there are major exceptions)
So, if I don't like the majority of the stuff out there, then how am I still identifying as a huge fan?
Or you've read more than 1000 Wookiepedia articles.
It basically comes down to what depth you absorb of the setting. The issue is that the "campaign setting" is not props, but that's what 7-9 directors treated it like.
And even though the Jedi powers are way OP, the Gennedy Clone Wars shorts are possibly my favorite thing EVER done in the Star Wars universe.
But as a general rule? You can be a fan of any part of a series and your fandom is completely legitimate. If you know all the details of three movies that puts you head and shoulders over someone who watches everything both uncritically and superficially.
I mean, you like what you like -and I'd say it's a question of depth of "liking" (knowing the lore, etc) rather than being comprehensive (liking anything that has 'star wars' written on the label).
Critics: it's too close to the source material and shows no imagination.
Show ran all the way through since it had only 3 seasons but you barely heard of it. Which is a shame, it is so good.
It wasn't a problem with the material, but the cast. Lyra and Will were just flat as could be. They both seemed bored, not as if they were involved with a multi-dimensional struggle of good and evil. I think it's just very difficult to find high-quality young actors.
Also, disclosing that this was in our world early in the series was a mistake. That was a huge "wow" moment in the book, not revealed until much later.
That's one of the key points of the books as well. Lord Asriel is the one who is fighting a multi-dimensional struggle of good and evil and it corrupts him.
Lyra and Will are kind of just struggling to figure out what they are supposed to do through most of the story, and eventually just kind of try and do whatever is right, while still harboring doubts about their actions. It's a more realistic story of a hero, in contrast to the others who are absolutely sure about the fact that they are in the right, which in itself leads them to doing terrible things.
The assuredness and lack of doubt in religion is something the original book story makes out to be a bad thing.
> I have over the years talked to a few (quite successful) Hollywood screenwriters, just through an accident of what I do for a living (I am a college professor who researches topics that sometimes get me in the same room as said writers). I had a very nice conversation once with one of the guys who had written one of the more modern Planet of the Apes films (I forget which one) about the difficulty of making films that were true to source material. This was in the context of World War Z, whose film is literally the opposite of the book in many ways (the book is about how there aren't singular heroes that are going to save the world, the film is about how Brad Pitt saves the world, to put it bluntly). Anyway, he made the point that the only way in which an existing form of IP has any chance of guaranteeing some fidelity is if the fan base is very large and very important to the marketing or acceptance of the film. So Harry Potter had to be (perhaps painfully) deferential to the original source material. But World War Z did not, because the imagined audience was several orders of magnitude larger than the people who had read the book.
> Similarly I don't think Gibson fans were the imagined audience of The Peripheral show, since there aren't as many of us as we'd like to imagine, and even most people who have read some Gibson haven't read The Peripheral (such is my experience, anyway; I know a million people who have read Neuromancer and that's it).
> I was a little stunned last week when my exercise trainer guy told me he was watching The Peripheral, because he doesn't read books at all from what I can tell. (He's a super great guy, and great at his job, but reading is just not really his thing.) Which on the one hand is a huge success by Amazon — they penetrated the jock-bro market with this series — but also explains, maybe, why they made so many changes. Which, again, I think is unfortunate, because I think you could have had something that was more interesting (and, incidentally, truer to the book, which is more interesting than the show) and still had a fairly large market. Because as you note, there is actually a lot of reasons to think that more complex shows resonate with many audiences more than "more of the same" shows. Sigh.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/WilliamGibson/comments/zawucs/comme...
Epic fantasy is hard. Look at the middle 6 WoT books, almost nothing of relevance happens in 4000 pages. When GoT was signed I'm sure GRRM promised them that the next books were already "done" and ready for release but as is typical, 12 years later they had nothing. Honestly, they should have diverged from the source after season 4 and create a new story that could be concluded satisfactorily.
Reading this makes me kind of sad because the industry right now wouldn’t support that. That author would get pushed right out, epub-only releases, less marketing, etc. I wonder if we’ll ever have a long epic like this again.
There is so much content out there that I don't see any particular thing as a "must experience" anymore.
HBO told the producers to take as long as they needed. I believe they were eager to jump to Star Wars and rushed to conclude the series.
See, at least the prequel trilogy of star wars had good ideas. It was just terribly executed.
The finishing episodes of GoT don't even have good ideas, in addition to being awfully written, lacking continuity, and poorly acted.
One of my favorite things was fans of the book series pointing out how Tyrion went from being the poignant observer of the universe through GRRM's eyes to simply being a sideshow dwarf that constantly said "my cock" and little else as soon as D&D ran out of book material for him. The "head vampire" trope for the NK basically meant I didn't watch the final episodes.
And Rogue One wasn't really that good, it was just "Battle Beyond The Stars", itself a cheap cash-in on the Star Wars craze, dusted off for Star Wars with some bad kung-fu movie tropes thrown in.
The real pain was people reading them when it came out, so they'd wait 2 years or whatever for the next book and then it'd come out and the plotline they happened to resonate with didn't get very far. Or it progressed some but didn't particularly end on a high-note.
The problem is that if you are at a point where even GRRM cannot move his own story forward, it's unlikely someone else will do a very good job.
And that's basically what happened. Even if the writers are the most top notch, they aren't GRRM, otherwise they would have their own fantasy series out under their own names, as opposed to writing for TV shows.
Very strong start, along with the next two books but yeah, I agree with GP just kind of wanders off and the plot stalls out. Maybe some day I'll have time to pick these books up and see if the other guy was able to tie things together.
Any other rando editor wouldn't have to cohabitate with the resentment caused by unflinching criticism of their spouse's creative output.
OTHER GUY: How can you read that series? It is sooooo boring!
READER: But it's so long!
Or folding their arms under their breasts. Or commenting on one another's cleavage. Or really any excuse for the author to mention boobs out of the blue for no reason at all.
This seemed to start somewhere around book 4, and it happens WAY more than in any other books I've ever heard of. Super awkward once you notice it. WTF man?
It's like they did some market survey and found that their average readers were all 13 year old boys who wanted to hear about... you guessed it.
Book spoilers ahead:
Look, I get that Loial can't be as big/tall for obvious reasons (budget, that CGI would be heavy) and I get that we skipped Caemlyn for casting reasons (can't really have Elayne/Gawyn/Galad/Morgase/etc show up now only to disappear for a season or two) but the whole "any of them could be the dragon" or "they could all collectively be the dragon" was annoying. Look, I'll be the first to point out the sexism in the books, the women fawning over men they have met 1-2 times, acting like love-sick puppies, etc but I'm not really sure that pretending one of them could have been the dragon is the way to right that wrong, if that was even the intention (also, to my understanding, the dragon is always male because of Saidin. I was also under the impression there has only been 1 previous "Dragon", Lews Therin Telamon, but the show acts like there have been many?).
The waygates really made me angry, where is the leaf of Avendesora? Literally every time they go into Ways we get a few lines to a paragraph describing the door and how it's opened but in the show you have to use the power to open it? How the heck is Loial supposed to open it when he, Perrin, Faile, Gaul, Chiad, and Bain supposed to travel back to the Two Rivers seeing how none of them can channel?
Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.
Anyway, WoT in particular aside, the basic principle is the same: if you're going to take on producing an epic work, I'd really prefer that you commit to actually finishing it. That's true pretty much regardless of what franchise/property we're talking about.
Not to mention the changed plot beats that I won’t spoil that rob Rand of his big moments and give them to all the female characters, when they already all have major plot moments in EoTW!
So sure it's sad to hear it's not authentic to the books, but I wouldn't have known without reading this discussion and honestly learning that now doesn't affect my viewing experience at all.
And I've heard some fans of DARK saying they just couldn't get into it because it was too slow, but I really liked that style of storytelling.
I just wish everybody and their mom would put on that show now even if they don't actually watch it, so maybe the numbers change and they reverse their decision. I actually took this as the final straw to cancel my Netflix subscription and will only ever sign up again if that show gets finished.
1899 released five weeks before Christmas. The peak viewership for a Netflix show is typically first or second week (I guess mostly since the first week tends to be partial) and drops of fairly rapidly.
For comparison, Wednesday released 1 week after 1899, even closer to the holidays, racked up 5x the view numbers of 1899, and even had more viewers on Christmas week than 1899 had in its best.
(For me, it's that the word of mouth on 1899 was not good. The specific complaints people had were just the kind of thing that would drive me up the wall. So while I binged a bunch of shows during the holidays with different subsets of family, 1899 wasn't even in the discussion with any of them.)
Thanks, interestingly, 1899 is number 2!
Ironically, everything "mysterious" is foreshadowed perfectly well. They're just using enough Standard Netflix Writing to cover it up at the start.
1899 was a detailed slow burn, not something you could throw on in the background while you're doom scrolling and still capture 90% of. Wednesday was a shallow faux-dark drama for the kids on holiday. We watched one episode, decided it wasn't for us, watched one more just to make sure, then never picked it back up.
Minors are where the money's at. Just look at YouTube and Twitch. Content for mature audiences is effectively over.
Edit: I should explain. We preferred to sit down to give 1899 our full attention. It's shot very dark, so we had to watch it at night after work and dinner, and when we were too tired, we waited until the next night to continue. Between holiday planning, wrapping gifts, shopping, travel, and all of the obligations that arose shortly after 1899 came out, we only managed half the season and haven't had time to complete it or any other show since returning to work. 1899 isn't really a show you can watch on your phone while you're brushing your teeth or async with another person, but it's so a bit much to binge.
So, obviously, we're not who Netflix makes shows for. We don't buy merch or follow stars on the social media we don't have. Our interaction is limited to watching and rating in the app and talking to coworkers and family about it.
Amazon's the tick was canceled, based on views, before I even got around to seeing it. Media companies need to get it through their heads that we're done watching TV and movies on their schedule. I've got far to much competing for my time and I'll get to things when it's good for me. That's what drove people to VCRs, then DVDs, then DVRs, then streaming.
They're still trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle. They often withhold episodes, choosing to dole them out once a week so they can longer maintain and better control social media coverage/adverting. I already wait until a season is fully released before I start watching (it's saved me from a lot of disappointment already).
> I just wish everybody and their mom would put on that show now even if they don't actually watch it, so maybe the numbers change and they reverse their decision.
Streaming services need to accept that the times and their viewers have changed. I'm not going to let them make me feel pressured to jump on every episode of something I enjoy the moment they release it, and I'm not going to spend my time trying to manipulate their numbers and hope that somehow that gets me what I want. Time is short and I've got plenty of better things to do than play games for the sake of clueless streaming companies.
> I'm not going to spend my time trying to manipulate their numbers and hope that somehow that gets me what I want.
Well I was half joking there, but it seems like this would be the only way to vote for a show if you don't have the time right now, but would like to watch it later and make sure it gets an ending. I don't know if this would really be worse than not doing it. Getting a show you'd have watched later cancelled, and then rewarding them for that by not cancelling your subscription also seems wrong.
this implies that we can choose to "get a show canceled" or not when the truth is we can only make guesses about what might or might not save a show. If netflix posted numbers on how many more views were needed to save a series, just for example, I might be more tempted. As it stands now though, there's no telling what will please them, or if it would matter, so there's little point in trying.
I'd rather continue to use the service I pay for in the way that's most convenient for me and most respectful of my time, and hope that eventually netflix realizes that if they cancel good shows over shitty and meaningless metrics they're not only throwing away the money they invested up to the point of cancellation, but that what they're left with can only hurt them from that point forward.
I've been with netflix since it's early days and while they get closer and closer to making me cancel every year I'm still hoping they do better. They don't really care about feedback though, so how I interact with their service has to express what I want from them.
If the point was to build up their own backlog of tv shows people watch, they aren't making much progress on that goal
It seems like only books get endings. Isn't there a way to read books in a shared way, like tv, so that I could do that with my wife?
I can't remember the last time Netflix released an amazing series.
It finishes the story before ending in a cliffhanger. And, honestly a second season would probably not be good at all, because there isn't much to add up to it.
I think of 1899 like the show Dark (also made by the same people i believe). Did i like Dark S1? Yes. Is it almost exponentially better when all the seasons are watched? Definitely. Gives me pains wondering what 1899 could have been when viewed through the Dark lens.
On the other hand, I also watched Wednesday and thought it was missing a lot of what made The Addams Family great. But I guess it just wasn't made for me.
> And if other people are also reluctant to start it for the same reason, that's going to hurt the viewership... which makes it all the more likely to be cancelled! You can't win.
I don't think they look at viewership when deciding whether to cancel a show. They look at the percentage of people that continued watching more than just the first episode.
We have every reason to believe that 1899 would have connected every one of those mysteries, because the writers planned the whole show out.
But if Netflix is only going to support reality cooking shows or breakaway hits, then we will never see another masterpiece on Netflix again.
I checked out 1899 but then I got busy with my two kids, work, and the holidays. I even gave it two thumbs up. I fully intended to watch the whole thing, probably multiple times because of all the details they put into it. But I need the time and focus to actually sit and watch it (and read all the subtitles)
But I guess according to their metrics, my single viewing of Ep01 hurt more than it helped because I didn't immediately binge the entire show to completion.
Exactly. Every series that ends well, even if it only ever attracts a small number of fans, is a benefit for netflix's library and service. Every show that they cancel is just a time bomb that will either sit unwatched by those who know better or disappoint and piss off one netflix customer after another that hasn't been forewarned.
Netflix needs to get their shit together.
Netflix might be doing weird stuff but 1899 is a really bad example because the mistake there was actually greenlighting the first season.
Ugh what a crappy way to start my morning :(. That was a legitimately good show and they ended on a massive cliff hanger.
What's most frustrating is they made changes that aren't even for the better. At least Foundation made a good sci-fi show based on someone who walked by a person reading the actual book (spoiler, re-reading the book did not hold up well for me), WoT somehow made a "meh" show which diverged from the books for no good reason.
I think I've fully moved into the "dear god please don't make a TV/Movie adaptation of a book series I love"-camp. I never read GoT but I liked the show and I think I've heard that, aside from the ending, the show does a pretty good job. Unfortunately I feel like way more often than not the Show/Movie is just a huge disappointment.
Cinema is suffering from the same thing, which is why superhero films and franchises rule the silver screen. It's not a good direction for the artform or any semblance of quality. So many great franchises were rough (or had poor TV ratings) in their first seasons that are now considered classics. From Seinfeld to Parks and Rec to X-Files to Star Trek TNG, there are countless examples.
It was #1 for 0 weeks, #2 for 3 weeks, and plummeted off the charts quickly after that.
There is probably some finger on the scale to keep things near the top and promote them longer if they are struggling to gain traction.
https://top10.netflix.com/tv?week=2022-11-20
There is no chance that they're fabricating these numbers. First, that would be securities fraud. Second, it would not work as promotion channel because basically nobody would look at this website to decide what to view. But it is great for getting data for obscure internet fights!
We were some of the first on Netflix's DVD library, and went to streaming as soon as they offered it. And early on, it was the best of the best. Now, it's throw-away B movie garbage you wouldn't even pay $1.99 in the Walmart's dvd bin, and riddled with shows that were great but naturally cancelled on a cliffhanger. I'm still sour about "Dark Matter". Bought from SyFy to Netflix, and summarily canceled.
I'll just wait until/if the shows are complete. And then I will acquire them. I've been done for a while, after paying waay too much and being jerked around by the media companies. Back to Yo Ho Ho. That means I can afford expensive rum :)
I suggest... acquiring... them.
That's what ending on a cliffhanger is like. You know there's more, and completes the whole story.. but you'll never see/read it.
Let Netflix produced a pile of garbage and I'll sift through the diamonds the year after... I have yet to have a year where there wasn't 3-5+ high quality streaming seasons (this yr = White Lotus, The Offer, and Severence).
If not you can always rewatch The Wire for the 5th time.
The only losers are those looking to binge watch new stuff every week... AFAIK those people were previously the audience for garbage prime time network shows on FOX/NBC/etc that no one even remembers the names of 5yrs later.
So I guess it sucks for them - being the guinea pigs for the rest of us ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
True that, but much of it isn't anything I'm interested in. 95% of it (to me) is crap - good ol Sturgeon's Law is certainly in effect.
So it leaves like maybe 1-2 shows per streaming service. Lets just say that math doesn't work out. And some networks show 1 episode a week, like the old analog days. Again, not watching until they're complete. And when they're complete, there's a great site that hosts ($name-$group-S##-complete). No subscriptions, no DRM, no anti-customer garbage.
> The only losers are those looking to binge watch new stuff every week... AFAIK those people were previously the audience for garbage prime time network shows on FOX/NBC/etc that no one even remembers the names of 5yrs later.
What I also do is look abroad to other tv shows that aren't as easily acquired in the USA. There's also a lot of gems that we just don't come across. You have more than a few really good European shows (some ENG, other subtitled). And the K-shows have some good fansubbers, as do CN and JP shows. And then there's anime. That's a whole different thing, given a lot now has been licensed.
But lest to say, we're picky. If we're going to spend time, we want something good. And well, the sole dealer that did this (Netflix) now has 1/15 the original selection. That tells me that I had to step up.
And on completely different note, you can get a 20 core/128G ram/ (6TBx8) 48TB storage dell for $830 on ebay. And it's surprisingly quiet after bootup.
The Dutch, Swedes, and Iceland seem to produce an exception amount of good TV/Movies despite their otherwise lack of cultural reach. Those regions are always a safe bet.
Netflix has no interest in paying for bad shows. Its not like networks, where they have to fill N hours a week whether anybody has a good idea or not. Their incentive is different from the networks, in that they can target the tiniest niches while the networks have limited airtime and must have big draws.
Is Netflix actually producing "garbage"? Or is it just appealing to vast numbers of niche audiences? Just because I think it's badly written and badly acted and utterly dumb doesn't mean it's not the favorite thing ever of some 12 year old girl in South Korea. Or a middle-aged computer programmer like me, who happens to (unlike me) enjoy noise in the background while they work.
I'd be really curious to know the distribution of Netflix show downloads -- what never gets downloaded, and what gets downloaded but shut off halfway through. Too bad they'll never tell us.
Netflix from what I can tell simply bootstrapped their own production company, and I think Amazon did too. My conclusion is that they are not organizationally good at production, they simply hope for miracles from whomever they put in charge of IP.
I mean, is HBO a "big company" from a production/management standpoint? Look at the quality they put out. NBC I believe is not that big anymore either, but their series and coherent branding simply seems so much better than Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Residuals.
(EDIT: https://mobile.twitter.com/PeterClines/status/16104085799406...)
After the initial window they have to pay residuals every time people watch the episodes. As a series goes on, more people might start watching if it’s popular. The people who are already watching may re-watch it to get ready for the new season. All of that means paying for residuals.
But if your shows are flash in the pan, that’s not as much of an issue. When Netflix cancels a show what are the odds a bunch of people are going to start watching it four years from now?
And what happens if you constantly drop new shows and heavily promote them, hiding what a person was already watching? They may go to that new show and stop watching the old one? The window is new on the new show.
Why release all episodes at once? So people watch it fast, not over enough time for residuals to be big.
It seems like they are incentivized to keep people from re-watching existing things.
This may not actually be what’s going on. But it seems to fit weirdly well.
Case in point, Angel, which was cancelled on a February when Joss Whedon, the showrunner, demanded to know whether or not they got a fifth season. Sort of a "tell me now or fuck it." Well ...
Granted, it wasn't a great choice for the network (that exec moved on, probably "failed upward") and it wasn't a good ultimatum for Whedon to make, but it does serve as an example of the kind of games that get played out, because quite a lot of networks would stop shows just before that, due to the Hollywood accounting being a pain once you had to keep paying your actors for decades. The math varies, so some shows go on, but that fourth season, man ... look out.
Whether they'd get a 6th season. It did get 5, with a total of 110 episodes.
I think he had a contract that guaranteed enough episodes to get into syndication, but no one liked the show. So it just sort of weirdly limped on in this strange netherworld until they fulfilled the contract. And a show that normally would have been replaced mid-season instead was on for 5 years.
So he's right about why WB cancelled and pulled a lot of shows (and the new CEO specifically acknowledged that this was done to avoid residuals) but wrong about why Netflix is cancelling shows.
It's actually very silly for Netflix to cancel shows after 1 season; they generally tie talent to 3-season deals so the cost for a show doesn't significantly increase until a 4th season. Basically, Netflix show financing frontloads all the costs of a new show on its balance sheets. It helped in the beginning to draw talent in, but now it's biting them in the ass because their shows start off more expensive.
Having sunk the money in, Netflix is faced with 2 choices: throw good money after bad and hope that the show can attract new viewers over the remainder of the initial 3-year contract, or just cancel the show. Most networks will give shows that are on the "bubble" of profitability additional time to try and gain an audience if the shows are cheap enough to justify the risk. But since Netflix frontloads the costs, the financial calculus rarely pencils out.
Ongoing royalties, i.e., the traditional meaning of residual, refers to royalties paid on the basis of ongoing views or sales. Netflix does not do this.
Licensing income royalties are owed when a movie is licensed. They are included in the term "residual" because all film libraries, except Netflix, continue to license out their IP on an ongoing basis. Netflix does not; they shop their IP once at the beginning and then never again.
I was referring to the former, not the latter, because the GP is talking about syndication residuals. My bad for forgetting that people on HN like to miss the forest for the trees.
> My bad for forgetting that people on HN like to miss the forest for the trees.
Yeah no. You were wrong. Suck it up instead of being passive-aggressive insulting. Your argument was based on the claim that Netflix "does not pay residuals", which isn't true. It wasn't true as initially written, and it still isn't true rewritten as "ongoing royalties". Netflix pays yearly residuals for as long as they keep something on their platform.
Being wrong isn't a big deal, unless you inexplicably double down on it and start insulting people.
1. https://www.wga.org/members/finances/residuals/hbsvod-progra...
Netflix is notorious for not allowing shows, even popular shows, to go beyond two seasons[1], so your subsequent paragraphs also seem to be incorrect.
It does make some difference for most streaming services who is responsible for the production costs of a show, but Netflix seems to have their own standard orthogonal to that, as they don't seem to cancel on the same basis as other services.
0. https://www.ign.com/articles/netflix-must-pay-42-million-in-...
1. https://nofilmschool.com/netflix-cancels-another-show-after-...
"Netflix employs a cost-plus model, which means that it pays a show’s entire production costs, plus a 30% premium. Netflix shows are expensive because the company holds onto them. There's no money to be made in syndication, so it needs to make creators feel enticed to sell their ideas to them."
Bonuses and pay bumps are not residuals. For successful shows, those happen entirely separately from residuals.
In the case of Bird Box, Netflix was deemed to have not paid enough upfront. It did not owe residuals on an ongoing basis. (Note that Netflix does all of its licensing deals at the beginning, it doesn't continue to shop them later. This is in sharp contrast to...every other film library, which continuously shops its IP out to other organizations as the point of having a film library is the long-tail licensing income.) Licensing residuals are not relevant to a discussion on syndication residuals.
Internet tells me streaming costs less than $.10/GB, which is about $.03/hr.
the platform has little creativity in any aspect of it...and the shows being done for a single viewing may just be the side effect of having no talent in anything except infrastructure planning....
It feels like the big difference is that Netflix is culturally bound to having very short seasons, which get pushed out at once but rarely (like, not even once per year). This has a bunch of effects, that make the cancelations more painful.
One is that the creators can't iterate and learn based on audience reactions. The classic network TV show pattern is a bunch of shaky episodes early on, until things click. If the first try didn't work well enough, too bad. You had your shot.
Another is that the creators get no warning for when the show will be over. The only thing they can do is plan for success. While a network TV show that's not doing well enough would often know "these are the numbers we need to hit in the early part of the season, or it's over". And then they can plan for wrapping things up. Sometimes this goes wrong, the ending gets rushed for a show that then miraculously finds another round of funding. But it is still better than the alternative.
The third is that shows have no time to build up word of mouth. When a new Netflix show drops, it is likely dead in the discourse two weeks later unless it was a once-per-year megahit like Stranger Things or Squid Game. When a once per week show drops, it'll get talked about weekly and (if the vibe is positive) pick up viewers. The most obvious case of this I remember recently is the utterly mediocre The Nevers. On the forum where I do my TV and movie discussion on, a Netflix show of similar quality dropping six episodes at once would warrant 5 messages in an omnibus thread, and then be forgotten. This got hundreds of messages of very engaged chat.
I’m somewhat tired of TV which expects me to dedicate 10-40 hours to it over 3 seasons. Ending on a cliffhanger is lazy. Why can’t I have plain old episodic TV? Strange new worlds felt like a breath of fresh air.
An example I like: the Fargo TV series. Each season is self-contained and none outstays its welcome.
One advantage of this format is that the importance of a show being ended on a cliff hanger had less relative importance to the rest of the show. If a show like the X-Files was going to get cancelled on a cliff hanger of the "main story", it didn't really matter because 9 out of 10 episodes didn't involve the main story and therefore wouldn't be retroactively devalued by a cliffhanger cancellation.
This is probably the root of the difference in my take on media - I don't believe it's possible for a later instalment to retroactively devalue previous ones.
e.g. The enjoyment I got from reading Dune wasn't diminished by Sandworms of Dune.
Incidentally, I haven't seen Dune 2021 yet because I don't want to watch half a movie until I am certain that the other half exists.
Sure, I’m fine with that analogy too. The second half of the book missing doesn’t retroactively diminish the first half. (I’ll allow that maybe you only get some of the enjoyment of the first half when you actually finish the book rather than when you actually read it, but it’s not a retroactive change.)
“Well, I suppose if all those shows go down the tubes, we might have a shot.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oMTmtN7lHI
Obviously that is not for everybody and that is fine, but I would have watched the shit out of it if it didn't get canceled.
Google famously kills projects and half-asses things. This destroys user trust. Eventually people won't use your new thing because they don't want to become dependent on something that's just going to languish before being cancelled.
Larry Page's "more wood, fewer arrows" idea never really took hold.
Apple OTOH is very good (mostly) at focusing on fewer things and seeing them through. Apple Pay is a prime example of this. Every month there are more banks and financial institutions onboarded.
But this hurts Netflix on both sides. The obvious one is for viewers. It's becoming increasingly less likely that I become invested in some Netflix series knowing it's likely fate. Even the otherwise excellent Ozark's 4th season felt rushed, like they were trying to cram 2-3 seasons of storylines into one season.
HBO has generally been very good at seeing things through. There are notable exceptions (eg Rome, Deadwood, arguably even Westworld although that one is complicated).
But it hurts Netflix on the creator side. If you're an Aaron Sorkin type shopping around your series and you have a lot of suitors, why would you choose Netflix when you fear it'll get cancelled prematurely. Now you can write in commitments into contracts. This happened with House of Cards, initially two seasons guaranteed IIRC. But not everyone has that leverage.
It seems like Netflix has fallen into the trap of optimizing for the wrong metrics, specifically short-term new customer signups. Maybe they look at customer retention too? Maybe customers don't actually care about this? I honestly don't know.
I do think they're hurting their brand though.
This is the most frustrating bit isn't it? Misalignment between customer and company incentives grows to the point of speaking alien.
Customer: "We want our favorite shows completed! Why are you f#cking over loyal customers?"
Company: "Let's cycle growth optimization metric A in favor of metric B. That'll mean eliminating these shows but profit margins should be healthier in X years due to [cite big data]."
They definitely look at that. They're aware that customers mostly don't finish the shows they start, that's something they've talked about before and probably a factor driving this decision.
The part that I would personally speculate that they may have missed is that for someone who never gets around to watching past season 2 of a 5 season show, the existence of the last 3 seasons might still be part of their decision to remain subscribed. But IDK.
When they cancel the shows without finishing them, it leads to "no point watching, no point paying"
Star Trek: The Next Generation serves as a good example; the first season was rough. Didn't hit its stride until the second, when Riker grew the beard.
I think the thing I like most about it, is that it treats its audience with respect. The rough plot of every episode can be followed by almost everyone but they don't dumb down the dialog or keep repeating the main plot points over and over like modern TV. There is almost never any filler and each episode unfolds rather than simply leading the viewer from scene to scene.
As a result, writers are incentivised to write convoluted, twisting, mysterious threads.
They're not required to finish them.
I don’t see that as a bad thing personally. But I’ve 100% avoided watching some series that I know have been canceled.
I’m wondering what a better model might be? Maybe air the pilots and let the people decide?
Getting rid for them is not exactly a loss.
If that’s your end goal, then the current model serves you well.
Getting rid of cliffhangers won’t stop your shows from randomly getting cut. Just give you slightly less headache when they are.
Hence why I’m curious about alternative models.
Imagine if they had finished, say, The OA, 1899, Glow, Sense8, and a couple of more of the series that had devoted fan bases. In the future, these shows would be a selling point for new Netflix subscribers. Instead, they're just junkyard scrap that almost nobody starts watching, since they know there's no satisfying ending.
I really appreciate that they had the decency to give Sense8 some kind of ending, but honestly I also understood why it was cancelled, it was extremely ambitious and expensive and at the time Netflix was just dipping their toes into originals. But at this point in the game it seems ridiculous to me for them to cancel something like 1899 because it's not the massive hit they expected, and I really mean massive hit because sure enough the show was quite popular looking at the numbers.
I've cancelled my Netflix subscription, of course, because the platform is just not giving me the quality I had come to expect. I was devastated when they cancelled The OA, specially given that it's a show that deals with emotional alienation; it really resonated with me. But oh well. Business is business, it just seems like personally I'm not very well aligned with the market.
It's why reality tv is beloved by executives because it's cheap and profitable.
You could watch an entire TV Show, Back to back with no interuptions, or waiting a week.
A Already made show would drop on nextflix, 5 seasons worth all at once, and "binging content" was born...
Sad they do not know their own market anymore. Who ever running netflix these days is terrible
I also do not subscribe to HBO Max in part because of that
But unless you actually cancel your subscription, that's not a bad thing for Netflix. All the time you're not in there watching content is time you're not consuming bandwidth or CPU cycles, etc. It's kinda like a gym: the perfect customer is somebody who signs up for a membership, and never shows up again, while keeping their membership active.
Now I know some people do the whole "binge for a while, cancel my subscription and come back in a couple of months thing." A good friend of mine actually does that. But I suspect most people are too lazy to bother, and keep their account active even when they aren't actively watching something. But maybe that's just me projecting? Hmmm...
*I know
Edit: awww, hn doesn't have strike through markdown support :(
Now I judge shows based on how they end. I don't care if I'm years late to watching it. If it's good it will age well, and if it's not then it won't. I've been duped too many times with Lost and GoT standing out in particular.
If I kept watching the new stuff, I'd be a sucker.
I thought it was pretty telling that in their little "tell us why you're cancelling" they didn't have "because we cancel too many shows mid run".
They didn't even have "just following your lead"!!
A Serenity to Firefly.
Even if one is shot every season that may be its last. Just left without post-production unless needed.
Everyone gets resolution, the show is presumably worth more in the catalogue and resale, and you've got people watching another couple of hours of content. No more "I'm not starting it, Netflix will kill it on a cliffhanger."
The shot footage can potentially be recycled for the next season anyway, or used to write out actors that don't return or whatever.
Would writing and shooting less than three hours of material, with no post-production, really cost that much more?
To protect yourself from this, it usually pays to either read stories from authors who've finished work in the past, or wait until they're done. Too long between episodes, or frankly lots of "slice of life" (cynically read: the author hasn't plotted anything out and doesn't have a plan to create and resolve conflict, so they just putter along) and most readers will lose interest.
Anecdotally this is why I stopped watching Rick and Morty even prior to the various revelations about the authors. They shed enough momentum that any interest in the characters or universe was lost. And R & M is a good example of what happens when there's no planned plot line: you end up with filler episodes like "Intergalactic Cable" where the authors just riff randomly.
For people who remember Babylon 5, there was a great deal of excitement in part because the arcs were all pre-planned which some viewed as a positive because there was no danger of the show just turning into episodic and formulaic exploitation of a known set of characters and places. We used to have TV shows just stagger on until cancelled, with showrunners hoping to be the next Simpsons, Star Trek or Stargate writer and now we're at the other extreme that if audiences don't show immediate and sustained engagement, the show (at least on Netflix, HBO MAX, etc) is doomed.
I’m still laughing at the concept of a deconstruction of homages to die hard. I love their perspectives on writing.
Yeah, part of my complaint is indeed there's no story arc, but my other complaint specifically about R & M was loss of momentum: they took so long between seasons it just stopped being interesting. Because even if I got back into the next season how long before the season after that comes around? I'd rather just stop watching. And again that's just a personal opinion. I don't expect most people will feel the same.
The emotional toll of the cliffhanger, the hours of pseudo-psychological filler (sorry, "character exploration") in-between bursts of narrative progression, continuously going from one macguffin to the other... It all takes so much time, and usually for little reward.
Apparently Netflix never "got the numbers" they wanted, which disappoints the hell out of me; it is some of the best work Netflix has ever done.
That said, God help the English and their insatiable appetite for procedurals to the exclusion of nearly everything else. The only thing more amazing than the quantity of repetitive detective shows is that the population hasn't risen up in revolt over it.
If I were to start any kind of television show, my contract would have a heavily-armored section about getting N number of episodes to wrap things up upon hearing of cancellation. Maybe N as a function of the number of seasons (and therefore loose ends) would be smart. But something, so that the work could feel finished, rather than terminated.
Also, please stop ending seasons with cliffhangers. Doing that equals to treating your viewers as dumb idiots who need an incentive to start watching the next season, aside destroying the series value in case of cancellation.
It sucks that 1899 was cancelled but to be fair I was expecting it personally.
There's enough good stuff out there, or series being completedthat even at 20-30 books per year I'm not lacking for anything to read.
I'm looking forward to reading The Kingkiller Chronicle, The Stormlight Archive, etc. ... someday.
But other than that, I completely agree with you. Anyone that has read The Kingkiller Chronicle will. Or The Song of Ice and Fire. In any case, I haven't ever really regretted reading a good book or watching a good series even if the ending is not out. So of course it's a shame for something to get cancelled or never released but they can't take away the good time you had with it in the first place.
From my small amount of experience absorbing the anime world, it seems like a lot of studios find a manga/source material, then cram all the storyline into one season as the funding might not be there, etc. etc.
I wonder if the motivations in the Anime world to put out one season are the same or similar to the Netflix show motivations - find a source material or writer who has a decent story, crank out a 1-season concept and if it takes off, you have a money-maker that will likely last a few years with more seasons/spinoffs.
See also this answer on stackexchange: https://anime.stackexchange.com/a/55361
> Now that late-night anime is the norm, the TV networks treat the shows like infomercials, and production committees making them are mostly interested in selling DVDs and character goods.
> Anime in itself isn't a recipe for profit, so bearing the risk of investment between a bunch of companies is better if a title flops.
There's a lot of single-season anime out there that fans generally understand as never having intended to continue, but instead were made more as advertisements for the manga/other media they were adapted from.
And don’t need to go all the way to Japan.
British shows used to have “series” which were self contained stories usually under 10 episodes sometimes even as little as 3 episodes in a series and series could be years apart.
However as budget grew and as British shows found audiences outside of the UK many have adopted a more seasonal approach with continuity between series and a yearly cycle.
However in general applying the anime way to shows is quite difficult because of the huge budget many shows require especially Scifi/Fantasy and historical dramas and a lot of that initial budget goes into setting up the production.
So you almost always need a multi seasonal plan to get those greenlit. Granted with CGI there is much less upfront sunken cost these days and much more of the cost goes into post production for each season but there is still enough when you need to build whole sets and costumes.
Miniseries also aren’t a solution mini series used to be pretty much made for TV movies with large budgets and often were huge events for the network.
Golden age 80’s miniseries like Winds of War, V and Masada from the 80’s had budgets on par with big movie blockbusters.
Winds of War which came out in the same year as Return of the Jedi had a budget of $40M to RoTJ $32.
By the late 80’s miniseries series like War and Remembrance were produced on a budget of over $100M, in fact War and Remembrance in 1988 had a budget larger than the 3 highest grossing films that came out that year - combined.
Limited series is the future.
What's wrong with telling a single story in 8-10 episodes and calling it a day ? Doesn't british television often work this way ?
Because people get comfortable with the characters/storyline and want to see more. Is it really that difficult of a concept?
And I find it amusing that you bring up British TV, because the only shows that I can think of that are super popular and have a worldwide audience are the ones that run for quite a while. The Crown, Downton Abbey, Peaky Blinders, Sherlock. Yeah they do a lot of shorter ones but those barely get out of the country as far as I'm aware.
I don't think everything needs to be super popular, have a world wide audience, or go on forever. Many British tv shows have a very different sensibility when it comes to seasons, the vast majority are done after 1-2 seasons.
It seems netflix tv shows should be more oriented as mini series.
It might be a better story if it was condensed, somewhere I read that removing in the edit phase is key and much more difficult but contributes to a better product.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktAbh39aoU8
Hilarious and watching I felt it was targeted directly at Netflix.
The cast typically want a big pay bump when it has become clear the show is successful...
Why watch a show in its infancy, when I know Netflix cancels shows early and sometimes with cliff hangers?
Why watch Netflix at this point?
"Netflix adaptation" is already a meme these days for a reason.
How do you square that with the people saying they would have watched it but never got the chance? It seems unlikely that a few weeks is enough to exhaust the pool of potential viewers, especially for a company which was once famous for monetizing the long tail.
That was their whole schtick - find undervalued series that had moderate viewership numbers on original airing, and then bank on those shows continuing to draw viewers over time.
That seems to run entirely counter to the current strategy, they fell straight into the trap of entering the production game, and it turns out they just aren't that good at it.
Which is a shame. They're undermining their own products dramatically by not letting stories wrap up. Their bread and butter shows don't exist if they've been cancelled because they weren't booming hard enough on opening weekend.
I watch a lot of shows, but a catalog of cancelled season ones is a hard "no" from me. Not interested, not going to pay for it. I finally cancelled because of the ads, but the outrageously large number of dead in the water shows in their catalog made it a lot easier.
Multiple seasons make me nervous, it feels like there’s an opportunity every new season for things to go bad and sour my opinion on a show. When writers are able to top the previous season it’s great, but increasingly it seems like the exception rather than the norm.
Now, it is a real thing that NetFlix has abandoned all pretense of building a catalog. They're now just ratings-whores like most content providers.
I watched it and liked it, but huh, I didn't realize that it was a record-breaking fluke megahit. Good to hear it'll get a second season, though!
Sigh.
Could streaming providers put this into the hands of the customers? What if they put the idea of "cancel or continue?" in their faces and made them vote with their feet (screens)?
It would be very interesting to hear from someone on the analytics team about how viewership data impacts show renewal, but I suspect this algorithm is super-secret sauce that keeps them profitable compared to their competitors.
One the one hand there is time for development that a movie would not have, on the other hand it often feels drawn out.
Same patterns emerge in gaming. Strong, very good gaming studios with established franchises suddenly come up with terrible sequels with mind boggling narrative, borderline idiotic, superficial characters and plot. And all of these took 5+ years to be made :DDD.
But, Netflix subscriptions are much more in the ‘gym membership’ economic model.
People watching shows on Netflix costs Netflix money. They would much rather take your money and have you not watch anything.
The ideal Netflix subscriber is someone who won’t cancel because they think they might want to watch something some time, but who whenever they browse the shows decides not to bother starting a show right now.
This strategy seems optimized for maximizing that audience.
I have read the above in the past but can't find a good source at present as I am on mobile so apologies.
Hence, new exciting shows they’ll hear about from outside Netflix to get them back in the app.
I think the real problem is that if you're very measurement based - you make poor product decisions. You might be able to optimize all sorts of metrics, but if you can't measure it (or measuring it is hard/noisy/laggy), you tend to lose sight of it.
In this case - Netflix isn't adequately measuring consumer satisfaction, and they haven't ever really been able to measure show quality without long term viewership numbers.
At best, they correlate show quality with viewership, but that's a tricky game, and it's often a very laggy measurement - viewership at release is a very poor gauge. Netflix became the behemoth they are today by focusing on the long tail of shows - shows that had consistently moderate viewer counts over a long period of time - rather than focusing on boom and bust blockbusters.
Personally - I think they're fucking up. I also cancelled this year after more than a decade.