It’s hard to imagine now, but when the US-version of The Office first premiered on NBC in 2005, the show was panned by both critics and audiences. People thought it was unoriginal, unfunny, and a bad clone of the UK version. But NBC made the call to renew the show anyway. It seemed to be the right one, because from season two onward, The Office US was winning plaudits everywhere, which lasted nine glorious seasons.
In the age of streaming, however, many TV shows aren’t afforded the same courtesy nor given the time to prove their worth. Data from media analytics firm Ampere Analysis suggests that on average, a Netflix Original gets just two seasons before being canceled.
Last month, sci-fi show Altered Carbon was inducted into Netflix’s expanding season-two cancellation club, joining Sense8, The OA, and Luke Cage in being axed after just two seasons. What followed was the now-traditional furious fan campaign to save the series from an early death.
Apart from the one-off Sense8 movie finale, which was commissioned following an aggressive campaign from fans, most attempts to bring a Netflix Original back from cancellation often fail. The company’s decision to cancel a show is often final—just ask #SaveTheOA. But while it’s sad for fans to see a show cut dramatically short, for Netflix it comes down to the data.
Netflix doesn’t release rating figures in the same way as linear television networks, but it’s been widely reported that it decides to renew or cancel its shows based on a viewership-versus-cost-of-renewal review process, which determines whether the cost of producing another season of a show is proportionate to the number of viewers that the show receives. “The biggest thing that we look at is, are we getting enough viewership to justify the cost of the series?” Netflix’s vice president of original programming Cindy Holland said in 2018, during the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour…
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