It's happened to a lot of us: you get invested in a Netflix show, gorge yourself on every episode, and then it's cancelled. The first thing I tried was The Unmatched American Vandal, a show that ambushed me as the best newest sitcom I've seen since It's Always Sunny in Philly, before being cruelly beaten after two seasons. Still, if I was willing to ditch my standards and watch The Ranch with Ashton Kutcher, I had a full 80 episodes to enjoy. Despite being a world leader in television production and distribution these days, Netflix's decision-making can seem as cruel as any traditional television network. A show can end up at the top of the most watched charts in the UK or the US and still end up in the trash. In the case of GLOW, it can even be nominated for four Emmys, receive widespread praise, and still disappear. It was revealed last week that the Sherlock Holmes-adjacent drama The Irregulars will not be returning for a second season. At the end of April, Netflix confirmed that the fifth season of the historical drama The Last Kingdom will be its last. Also in late April, it was confirmed that Katherine Ryan's sitcom The Duchess was axed for its star after one season, though Ryan explained that around 10 million people watched it over the course of its first 28 days. These aren't really connected events, but they do raise the question of why Netflix is canceling a show, and what counts as success or failure. Below, we'll take a look at how Netflix shares its data, what we can learn about why a show gets canceled from other sources, and why it feels unfair when Netflix is focusing a series.
Netflix data sharing is limited
From the outside, Netflix cancels differs from traditional TV networks in the way it shares its data on individual shows. This is not the case, most of the time, unless you are bragging about the success of a new series or a new series to shareholders. Which is why, in its latest letter to investors, Netflix touted that Cobra Kai Season 3 was watched by 45 million households in its first month, or that the mother-daughter comedy Ginny & Georgia was watched by 52 million households. . So you tend to learn more about the successes, but not necessarily about the failures. This means it's hard to understand Netflix's internal criteria for whether or not a show has performed well, or indeed, what are the reasons why a series isn't renewed. Netflix notably changed its criteria from what counts as a household watching a show in early 2020 to just two minutes. "The choice to look and stare for at least 2 minutes, long enough to indicate that the choice was intentional, is the precise definition," is how this metric describes it. So, 45 million households watched the third season of Cobra Kai for at least two minutes (and hopefully more, if they have the slightest taste for good television). Traditional American television networks, by comparison, use Nielsen ratings as a widely used industry standard. Basically, this means that a sample size of US viewers is used to determine the overall success of a series, or its share of the total audience; as of October 2019, that sample was 40.000 households of around 100.000 viewers, according to The Hollywood Reporter (Nielsen's exact methodology is explained here). Not all decisions about the future of a TV show are made based on Nielsen ratings. Distribution or broadcast arrangements can also be a factor, or how a show behaves during repeat viewing. But traditionally, you could at least understand the logic of canceling a low-rated network show: the data is publicly available for consumption and analysis. With Netflix, it's more of a mystery and we end up looking elsewhere for information.
Les Irréguliers as a cancellation case study
(Image credit: Netflix/Matt Squire) The way we find out that these shows have been canceled is also a point of frustration. Professional Hollywood publications tend to get the news: Deadline revealed that The Irregulars had been cancelled, for example, rather than Netflix's own (extremely active) social media channels. We're left to guess that the limited popularity of the series was a factor, rather than exactly why it disappeared.
Sometimes we learn the reason why: for Netflix's removed shows, The Company and I disagree with that, increased budget costs after the pandemic would have been a factor.
The cancellation of The Irregulars, however, is pretty light on the details if you're a fan and want to know why he got it. Arguably, the schedule was tough too: The Irregulars made their debut on March 26. On May 5, the news of its cancellation spread. There's no doubt that Netflix has the data to understand why this was the right move, but that basically means that the only window that mattered for this show to get renewed was when it opened.
What if a show really catches a year or two, or finds a cult following over time? The message is, it doesn't seem to matter, based on the Irregulars axe. However, quick cancellations are certainly not unique to Netflix and long before the existence of streaming services. But in theory, a streaming service has the power to keep a series running forever, and the lifespan has the potential to be longer.
The key question for The Irregulars is: could this qualify as a hit? Netflix itself hasn't disclosed the show's performance, but several third-party sources have. Nielsen, which only measures streaming in the United States, says The Irregulars was watched for 643 million minutes in its second week, ending April 4. It was the best show this week on any transmitter I measure.
That's more than the much-hyped Disney Plus Marvel show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which garnered 629 million minutes of US viewers; of course this show is released weekly whereas The Irregulars has gone down with the rather long eight episodes at once. .
Therefore, this comparison is not very useful. And since we don't know how it performed internationally, or what Netflix's criteria are for a successful series, we can't take the Nielsen data as proof that it was successful, even though it's number one on this particular chart.
Let's look at another source of information. Reelgood, which measures the viewing habits of 2 million registered users in the US. In the US, it ranks The Irregulars' popularity below recent Netflix hits like The Queen's Gambit and Bridgerton in its first four weeks of availability. In its first week, for example, Reelgood said The Irregulars had a 3,7% "streaming share and engagement" among its users, compared to 5,4% for The Queen's Gambit. In its fourth week, The Irregulars had fallen to just 1,2%. The Queen's Gambit, meanwhile, jumped to 5,7% in the fourth week. This suggests that he did not have a long line of spectators.
Netflix's global reach is a factor in fan reaction
(Image credit: Netflix/Matt Squire) The way Netflix puts out shows is very satisfying: new seasons are dropping all over the world, all at once, for everyone to enjoy simultaneously. That's a good thing in terms of access, and a far cry from the era of staggered global broadcasts at the whims of local networks. It also means that disappointment arguably increases when a show is cut. Netflix has a massive platform, with over 207 million paying global subscribers – if a show hits a certain level of popularity but still gets cancelled, that means there are a lot of people who can potentially get all excited at the same time. It sounds arbitrary, but it's quite different from how traditional TV works, where everyone in the world can't be trusted to watch the same thing at the same time. For example, I was very excited to see the AMC series Lodge 49, with The Falcon and Wyatt Russell from the Winter Soldier. The first season is streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the UK, but I can't watch the second there. The show was canceled in 2019 after those two seasons; apparently only American viewers who watched it on cable when it aired could affect the outcome. If Lodge 49 were a Netflix show, it would have been released in the UK at the same time it landed in the US. There may be a British contingent of fans who liked the series. It may have mattered to Netflix, as a service that calculates the popularity of 'member households' around the world. Since Netflix is a global platform, I think the relationship with the shows we love is a little different. On the one hand, you pay directly for the service. When you watch something for multiple episodes, it counts as an endorsement, and TV shows refer to your investment as a viewer. If you take the time to watch something that you think is the hot new thing, then it won't get the second season it might have needed to reach its full potential, it just doesn't feel right. It might be a business reality, but it certainly made me more likely to commit to watching a limited series than an ongoing show. At the end of the day, Netflix isn't really any fairer than other broadcasters when it comes to removing shows; It all depends on your criteria and priorities. The difference is that, by scale, even a small hit on Netflix seems to have a bigger cultural impact than a show on a more obscure streamer. It's just the double-edged sword of the way Netflix does things. At best, we all ingest Tiger King at the same time. At its worst, it can mean that you feel hard when your favorite series is in a can.