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Comment by esskay | Hacker News Reader

Not really that surprising is it? I'm waiting for the day they send me the inevitable notice to pay more, aka the day I cancel Netflix.

They could get away with this if their offering was substantially better than the competitors but thse days it's not. Pumping out complete crap like 'The Floor is Lava' and the 9 millionth cake contest isn't what built their massive customer base. These days when a new hyped show comes up its often not even worth watching until you know for sure it's not already been axed, having left the show on a cliffhanger.

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Netflix axing incomplete shows has become like Google killing products: people are starting to become aware of it, and that puts them off picking up new products.

It's also self-sabotaging behavior from the point of view of a back catalog. If people know in advance that a show had an unsatisfying ending, they're not going to recommend that people go back and watch it. But then Netflix and everyone else seems to treat shows as disposable these days, as if nothing mattered six months after it came out. Yet people still talk about The Wire (first broadcast 2002)

This happens with a lot of modern media. There's a lot of indie authors that keep starting new series which get dropped or continue getting written based on sales. But once you know an author is prone to dropping a series without finishing you stop picking up their books.

It's actually really frustrating to see an author continue starting one new series after another rather than finishing any of their existing works. It's probably not as fun or exciting, but it feels like an integral part of bulding trust. If I'm going to get emotionally invested in a series I want it to have a real ending.

In Japan it's very common for a series to get a single anime season, but if you're really invested in the story you can continue reading the light novels. But if a story is a Netflix Original, there's no source material you can turn to when the series gets cancelled.

The Wire is on the level of truly good literature. Its form is just it's TV. That's it.

I wish one of the streaming services would give a "no major loose ends" guarantee.

If a show really needs a cliffhanger the show should budget for an extra episode to air if the next season is cancelled. If they don't want to do that, just end the season finale without a cliffhanger.

If Netflix had this guarantee, I would watch a lot more series. (I'm still a bit upset that HBO cancelled "Beforeigners" that had a major cliffhanger)

Well you have to keep in mind that these productions are basically discrete companies themselves.

Providing such a guarantee would be akin to guaranteeing that a multitude of small businesses will not fail... which just isn't really possible.

Except that’s not the case at all, all of these shows are greenlit and bankrolled by Netflix, who makes the choice whether or not to continue with it.

On that subject, I really like what Josh Whedon did with Buffy's season 4 ending episode, "Restless", where the big bad was defeated on the penultimate episode, while the last episode serves more as an introspection on each character's fear.

Per Josh Whedon commentary [1]:

"This was one of the years where I was pretty convinced we would actually be picked up for another year, so we left a lot of things hanging. But at the same time I always felt if this was the last episode we ever filmed, it would be a good last one because it really did just get us into the minds of our characters, whom I love very much, and let them just sort of exist."

[1] https://stormwreath.livejournal.com/69633.html

I'd even settle for a sit-down with the writers and show runners where they go over what the ending would have been, even if they don't get a chance to actually film it.

This was my main problem with Netflix and why I cancelled it a year or so ago. When I realised we often couldn’t find anything we were bothered about watching, it just became a waste of money.

If they were smart they'd realise they could launder their overall viewer figures in the stockmarket and (ponzi-style) have the latest shareholders pay them* for inflated 'low rent' users instead of scaring away those users and trying to turn a profit on a shrinking viewer population tolerating higher fees.

* via SBC with SP maintained by higher viewer figures.

The only new show I thoroughly enjoyed on netflix lately was "who is the mole" which is based off the dutch hit series "wie is de mol" which is an absolutely fantastic and unique game show.

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