this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Movies and TV Shows
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It is bizarre to me that people act like streaming services invented the concept of canceling series after just one season, or believe that it's a new practice. Broadcast TV has regularly done exactly the same thing for its entire history. Streaming services almost always at least release all the episodes rather than leaving some of them unaired.
What boggles my mind is that streaming services will end a show leaving the story unfinished. Why not finish it, even if in a single episode? It makes the difference between a series that few will watch in future and one that adds positive value to their permanent archive to keep and attract customers.
Also, leaving so many things abruptly unfinished erodes audience trust, especially as it happens left and right for a prolonged period of time.
I think if you were to chart the number of single season series over the years, you'd likely find that streaming media has exponentially more cancelled shows after one series because it's easier for them to monitor engagement of the series by viewers and cut the fat when they think a show won't succeed based on the metric data they have.
Can you imagine shows like Stargate SG1? They most likely would have been cancelled after season1 because the viewer count wasn't there at the start of the series.
I actually did run some numbers on this at one point and found that the cancellation rate on network shows has ranged from 30-50% for the last 70 years, with the average number of seasons hovering just under 2. Reddit post with graphs and sources.
Running the same numbers for streaming services is trickier, and I couldn't figure out a reliable way to get a good data set to analyze. But even so, the numbers for broadcast TV are high enough that it would be numerically impossible for streaming services to, say, be 3 times more likely to cancel a show after one season.
Interesting, so would you say the ratios were similar between streaming and non-streaming networks?
I have reddit blocked at the router level so I can't view anything on that site (still boycotting the company lol)
My intuition is that it's probably in about the same range as the broadcast networks, but I have no numbers to back that up.
I don't think it can be significantly higher or lower: if the cancellation rate were significantly lower, "streaming services always cancel after one season" wouldn't have caught on as a perception, and if it were significantly higher, it wouldn't be as easy to find multi-season streaming shows as it currently is. But is it slightly higher or lower? I have no idea.
Firefly 😢