At this point, Netflix is as notorious for canceling shows as it is for staying on the service. Over the past few years, the streamer has hosted so many different shows that it can be hard to follow them all. But with the sheer volume of shows, there have been huge cancellations, including many high-profile shows after just one season. However, the Netflix CEO says the company has never canceled a hit show.
That’s probably hard to believe, based on the outcry from fans that have been heard when certain shows have found themselves on the chopping block. Yet Netflix’s new co-CEO Ted Sarandos says Bloomberg the company “never canceled a hit show”. In this case, your definition of success is a ratio of the show’s audience to budget. A show that has a big budget, but a small audience, is not a hit.
As far as it goes, it sure makes sense. No business is going to spend a lot of money if they don’t think they’re getting a return on that investment. While many of these canceled shows clearly had vocal audiences making their displeasure known, that doesn’t mean the show had a huge following. Here a line is drawn between popularity and success. A show that is one isn’t necessarily the other.
At the same time, it’s virtually impossible to know what Netflix is planning for a large audience in this case. The more expensive the show, the bigger the audience apparently needs to be, but since we usually have no idea how many people watch a Netflix show, it’s impossible to determine what a show has to accomplish in order to survive.
All we have to do is rate a show, as listed by Netflix. When you like a show Wednesday arrives and remains the most popular show on the service for weeks, we can be pretty sure season 2 is coming, but beyond that, nobody really knows. Given that Netflix has over 230 million subscribers worldwide, global audience expectations for any series could be quite high.
And of course, streaming metrics are different from other forms of entertainment. People don’t buy tickets like movies or watch commercials like traditional television. In this case, viewers have already largely spent the money in the form of a monthly subscription to Netflix. The question isn’t so much whether enough people will watch another season of the show, but how many people might start subscribing to watch the show, or how many subscribers might lose service if they don’t. there was no season 2?
Source: Cinemablend
