New Data Suggests Long Waits Between Seasons Are Hurting Viewership on Netflix Hits
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198 replies
I don't watch a Netflix series that isn't 100% complete already, because they cancel fucking everything. It's not worth the investment.
I learned decades ago to do the same with book series.
I'm glad I never got into A Song of Fire and Ice when my friend recommended it to me about it in university about 20 years ago.
Well, first season of AGOT is airing soon, a dance of dragons is also releasing soon, this seems like a great time to dive into the series! - me
Too true. I was recommended that too about 20 years ago, I had been out of university for a while by then. I looked, thought, I'll wait for it to finish. I'm really surprised he hasn't just hired some Brandon Sanderson type to finish it like Sanderson did for Wheel of Time. Maybe after he dies.... I'm not being morbid, and I don't wish death on Martin.
Unless he changed his mind, he has already said he won't let anyone else finish it even if he dies. So chances are slim.
And Brandon Sanderson said he wouldn't do it because it's a very different style from his
Hard to stop anyone from doing anything once you're a corpse. If there's enough money involved, somebody is gonna finish that series whether he likes it or not.
His estate will also have fuck you money. So if the executor sticks with his wishes, then it'll be difficult and costly for anyone to go against it. There is always the chance they will try to make more money by selling the rights though. So who knows?
Kingkiller Chronicles taught me that one
Came here to say this... It's so freaking nuts he hasn't finished it.
Either it never gets finished or it finishes long after it should've.
I’m still mad about Santa Clarita Diet
I’m mad about Cowboy Bebop, which was actually pretty good, despite what you may have heard.
Netflix didn’t advertise it to normies and die hard anime fans trashed it. I think if they had advertised it to people like my dad, it would have done well.
Cho was the right guy for the job 20 years ago. Vicious did not need the Kylo Ren treatment. Faye was neutered. Ed was absent. Jet was perfect. Overall the show was too fast where it needed to be slow and too slow where it needed to be fast.
Not surprised it got canceled. It's a shame to think of what could have been.
The Vicious stuff was my least favorite part. I actually liked how they changed that story quite a bit, but the scenes just didn’t hold up. Idk if it was casting or editing.
Chris Yost did a great job with the three main characters though and I think that’s the right take as he goes into production on Dungeon Crawler Carl so I’m excited to see how that turns out.
I’d have loved a prequel series about Jett. The casting was perfect and a noir crime serial set in that universe could slap.
Can confirm, my dad watched it and loved it and he's not an anime guy in the slightest.
My dad also loved it and has never heard of the original
Heard of original but never watched it. I liked the netflix one.
That was actually the straw that broke my back. Cancelled every subscription I had and went back to sailing.
So I guess in a way I should thank them on helping me save hundreds of dollars a year in this economy.
Still doesn't fill the void left by the SCD cancellation...
I’m gonna need to see the math on that.
That was before everyone and their dogs has their own streaming services. "In this economy," implies now with 20 different services out there. I'm still not paying anything. Hence the hundreds.
We never found out what happens with Mr. Ball legs!
Me too that was bullshit! Fuck Netflix any show I got into they canceled.
Fuck that show was so good
not just netflix, every streaming service/studio does that now.
I really like the artist/author Brian K Vaughn. Millions of people do. One of the best selling authors of graphic novels that exists.
Just finished reading "Y: The Last Man", oh, there's a TV show?.... canceled after one season....
"Paper Girls"?..... canceled after one season...
If they try to tell me that "Saga" is in the works for a TV adaptation (which... fucking good luck) I would hardly be exited for it. Because why get my hopes up? The books are amazing anyways. The art is beautiful in the way it was illustrated. The only advantage a TV show has ever given is being able to easily share the story with family and watch together.
Apple doing it right. They have Silo and they just finished season 3 and 4 already filmed and will be out next year.
Apple isn't perfect. They cancelled Sunny on a cliffhanger after a single season.
Sunny was great. That was a show I couldn’t get my friends to watch for some reason.
They cancelled Big Door Prize on a cliffhanger too.
But overall, I do think the Sci-Fi shows they make are of good quality.
Yes, in terms of the quality of their shows they are consistently high compared to competitors.
I'm so glad they're the ones that got Brando Sando. I'm so excited for the Stormlight show
If anything they're adding too many seasons! Ted Lasso was done. Also I thought For all mankind was done... Had such a great finale. Then the latest season dropped!
I don't understand how you thought FAM was done when they left it wide open at the end of every season.
The showrunners expected 6 or 7 seasons for “for all mankind”: https://collider.com/for-all-mankind-seven-season-plan-writers-comments/
I gave up on All Man Kind when they got to Mars and met North Korean. It just started to get to ridiculous for me. The first 2 seasons were good.
They mentioned North Korea building its own Mars program multiple times. It wasn't ridiculous if you paid attention.
Then you have pluribus which is going to be at least two years between seasons. If I had known that I wouldn't have bothered with the first season.
He has specifically said Saga will never be adapted while he has the power to say so. He says the story fits the comic medium perfectly and would be diluted going to film. This was even before Y and PG got canned. I really love his work, and actually enjoyed the 2 shows.
I just went ahead and read those Brian K Vaughn series without ever watching the shows because they actually have endings; except for Saga, of course, which will doubtless continue in fits and starts for another twenty years.
To be fair, Y the Last Man was a terrible show
Yeah Kaos was the last blow to me, especially being it sounds like everyone involved in that really enjoyed it, it was the numer 1 show at the time, and the next two parts were already outlined and ready to shoot with an actual ending already in mind.
Netflix proved with Kaos that there is no actual logic behind their content decisions
I don't know if it's true but I read somewhere that Netflix cancels a lot of shows after 3 seasons because there are things in the contracts where people get paid more to make the show after three seasons.
I do that with all series. I watched Breaking Bad shortly after the last episode aired, and did so with all series ever since. I have a list of series I want to watch, but they will wait until they are done.
I don't watch half of a movie either, why would I watch half of a series.
👆
that seems irrelevant to this issue. this is about people who do initially watch that lose interest.
dur
The problem is that there's a fundamental divide between having long, regularly running shows and high quality story-driven stories. IMO they should stick to having long runners with the more old school format, one season a year, possibly more episodes per season, even if the quality suffers from it, and then go all out on limited series that wrap in a single season, and treat those more like extra long movies cut into parts. Now they're trying to be somewhere in the middle and that's the result.
Shows overstaying their welcome has always been such a massive issue. Execs see how popular a show becomes and demand more ASAP, even if the show was never meant for it. It's pretty old now, but Heroes is such a good example. The writers wanted the show to follow an anthology format, mostly new characters and stories every season, but seeing the cult following, NBC wanted more of the same, despite the writing not being there to support it and it went downhill fast.
I thought it was the writers' strike that ruined it?
It was a shitstorm of things that hit it from multiple sides. NBC wanted more episodes asap, writers strike, a show that was never intended for multiple seasons of the same story, and a massively squeezed production timeline absolutely demolished that show.
Yeah things need to have an end with these kinds of stories. Conversely though, there's definitely stories or concepts which work great in the long term, it's just that we need to accept maybe they won't feel like movies and just roll with the formulaic nature, nothing wrong with the monster of the week IMO.
"Can't wait to watch this in 10 years when it's finished"
"No shit" /thread
The shitty writing is also hurting Netflix viewership. As is cancelling shows that are well written and have a fanbase just because you have to pay the actors and staff more after 3 seasons.
that too, sandman had the comic to go on, but they still are pretty cringly written, not to mention change the characthers away from the source material. we know gwendoline was great, but she doesnt fit into the lucifer role. blood of zeus had issues too apparently.
What you don't want to wait 3 years for a new season of a show that will be far more written by a committee of execs who know nothing of artistry and only care about metrics and what's currently popular, only to find out a month to a year later that it's been canceled prematurely?
or netflix, wait a few years, then make 1 last season and then cancelling it, while they forgot the other seasons already.
It also hurts to kill shows that were really good and instead replace them with reality TV trash.
reality shows serves the lowest common denominators, no need to pay for scriptwriters or actors, low cost.
Not even just Netflix. My interest in a show like severance has completely dissipated. I could care less if the show ends in writing or ends by cancellation. It has taken way too long for this show to get more episodes, let alone wrap up. I do not want to rewatch the show every time a new season comes out just so I do not miss out on key details on the new season. I do not want to watch a summary at the beginning of each episode to remind me of those key details because I didn't rewatch the whole series before starting the new episodes. Oh and only for them to release 8 episodes per season at that!?!
Then take something like pluribis, really good TV show they were greenlit for two seasons by apple right off the bat. Yet only had one ready when it released? What bullshit is that? I am tired of getting invested in worlds only for me to have to wait years to MAYBE get invested again. What happened to the 25 episode per season days.... Fuck we had it good.
With Pluribus, the first season aired in November 2025, and as of June 2026 they still haven't finished writing season 2 yet. I have no idea why it's like that.
Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum, Slow Horses season 6 starts this week, and they're already filming season 8 lol.
God Pluribus sucked. IDK how Vince Gilligan went from producing some of the best television in history with Breaking Bad and Saul, to this absolute snooze-fest of a show. I couldn't even make it past the second episode. Even with its slow-burn storytelling, BCS was still more attention-grabbing than Pluribus.
I'm shocked by this take. I thought it was a wonderful show that turned in quality performances. You do you. I hope you found some other show you loved.
I watched the whole season and thought it was okay (but yeah very slow like you say), and TBH I've already forgotten what happened and I don't particularly want to watch the whole thing again to catch up if season 2 is still a year away (or more.)
seems all these shows always ends with terribly written series finale anyways, because they took so long in between seasons they forgotten how the show went.
I, for one, do not miss those days. That being said, shows with that many episodes were either cheap/not very good or had short episodes (around 22 minutes). In the latter case, that would make the season around 12 episodes long which isn't all that different from what we have now.
I heard an analysis of it once that when you had 22-24 episode seasons you could take chances on a couple episodes. You had episodes that did a western theme or shot it in reverse or some other odd thing. Not all we're hits but at least it was different from everything else and sometimes they were amazing. Now with 8 episodes everything has to drive the plot forward.
You're not just talking ablut posssibilities, but also about extremely different types of shows. You can have both. I like shows like community that do the type of thing you mention but I enjoy shows like barry far more.
That's fine you can like whatever you want. The thing is, I don't think a single show on any of the streaming shows has 22 episode seasons. We are just asking for that format to not disappear.
That format was mostly just extremely short episodes with a lot of advertisements as padding. A show should have as many episodes as its creator wants. If most choose fewer and longer episodes, so be it. Also, as I've already explained, a season with 10 50 minute episodes is literally the same as a 20 episode show with 25 minute long episodes. You're just asking for the episodes to be edited differently. Instead, I propose you look into what a pause button does. It might just be the only thing you need to get your 20 episodes back.
I'm not sure if you're just being a troll or serious with this. A 1 hour episode isn't just 2 30 minute episodes put together. Each episode has a full story arc, theme, lesson, etc. you couldnt have the first half of your 50 min episode be a sherlock holmes episode then the second half be a normal episode focused on the story. Also the artists aren't making the decision how many episodes netflix will buy.
Sure bud.
I like those series that are 15-20 episodes and then done. A lot of Korean series are like that.
Damn right. A good miniseries will always trump a good long running one in my books.
What's with the downvotes though? Do people dislike maths or something?
I'll never watch Friends, Buffy or any other series from that era because there is way too much to watch! Fully agree with you.
Yeah no shit, I stop caring after 2 years
Care? I've forgotten the series even exists after 1 year.
"Data suggests" as if it necessitated a deep study and wasn't very apparent already.
There's a certain impression among management that "apparent" isn't enough to make justifiable decisions. To make proper decisions, you need facts. The most obvious type of facts are numbers.
There is a common misconception that numbers and a story about them are required for good decisions. Worse, some seem to think they're all it takes.
"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" is bullshit and MBAs were a mistake.
I think they are falling into the same trap as the quantitative fallacy that McNamara fell into. They only think in terms of numbers and nothing else. So they only care about what's measurable. You know what's not measurable? Art. Taste. Their entire business model. So of course a bunch of MBAs are going to fuck it all up because they are just extrapolating what was good in the past and what is quantifiable. Of course they have no over arching strategy and their tent poles end like a wet fart because they don't have any direction in mind and they can't stop fucking inserting themselves. I get the feeling that the execs at Netflix (much like most producers) don't even like the productions they are a part of. Like watching the McDonald's CEO try to eat a hamburger.
Worse yet, they'll pick something measurable, declare it an appropriate proxy, handwave any concerns about accuracy with the 80/20 rule (without ever checking whether the inaccuracy actually fits into those 20%), talk about the higher level view and big picture and make my life hard by refusing to actually engage with my questions about what they wanna measure, then complain when they don't understand the result of my best guess.
Some managers are lovely to work with. Others have a bunch of buzzwords and wisecrack quotes that sound authoritative in place of sound reasoning.
Netflix is especially susceptible to this since their platform gave them far far more data about viewing habits than any previous media platform. I'm not surprised they got addicted to data, and then went down the fallacious path of "facts don't exist unless they're in our data".
Did people pay to investigate that? Because, uh, fucking duh
Literally all you had to do was go to a Stranger Things subreddit/facebook group literally any time between seasons (2-3, etc.) and you'd have novellas-worth of proof.
I've stopped watching so many shows Stranger Things, Wednesday. So many shows I liked got canceled I don't even watch series anymore.
they could probably write out a more robust series.
I'm guessing the investigation was to determine how strong the effect is, to see how much money is worth spending to avoid the issue?
I saw a study the other day explaining that people that learned how to swim at some point in their life are statistically less likely to drown.
In other news, a new study plans to analyze the wetness of water over the next five years.
That one actually surprises me. I'm a lot more willing to put myself in positions where I might drown because I know how to swim. If I didn't I wouldn't go in pools or on boats
New data confirms CEOs need data and cannot just think for 5 seconds like a normal human being
This
Its an obvious thing and I've stopped watching countless shows because it took years to get to the next season of just only 10 over produced episodes
Those that I did watch, it took me half of those episodes yo just get back into it again, and quite a few I just dropped out before I got to that half because of course you're completely out of it
Then the 10 episodes... Give me back the 24 45 minutes episodes, PLEASE. I want the filler bottle episodes as many of the best episodes are bottle shows. The few over produced episodes are typically lots of bowwow, fireworks and bling bling fun spectacles, but they're rarely the best episodes.
They also lose viewership when jacking prices or repeatedly canceling series.
I basically won't start a series that hasn't ended because I got tired of getting invested into something that gets botched or canceled.
Don't forget the commercials, arhhh ye land lovers
I know it doesn't really matter, but it is landlubber. A lubber is someone who is awkward or clumsy. So a landlubber was someone who was awkward on a ship because they weren't accustomed to the sea.
Til, well thank you
Huh, all these years I thought land lubber was just a mispronunciation of land lover. An important one just because it has personality, but still technically "wrong". Crazy.
I should do that and also start waiting for the first critics to complain, because I'm still pissed about the first Netflix Avatar season and the second one got me riled up as well.
I mean I will probably still watch the third one, but ... I don't know. I have absolutely no clue how to cope with this.
Netflix, what the fuck are you doing? You were the chosen one. The light bringer!
Oh, wait...
also the cancelling of the shows before season one finishes.
I would welcome more of that. Don't write season 1 to set up an arc that will take 7 seasons to complete. Don't end it on a cliff hanger. I would love more single season shows. That way, I watch the last episode, appreciate the fine work that the cast and crew did, and forget about it for the rest of my life (unless I want to rewatch it or recommend it to a friend).
Recently, there was a bit of an uproar because Spider-Man Noir is starting to be nominated for awards but Amazon has announced that they are not doing a second season. I think Amazon's error was considering season 2 at all. The show has a neat arc, it ties up all the loose threads, and the final scene is the characters moving on with their lives.
The arc takes as long as they think they can get away with it and hold viewers. Stringing people along like Game of Thrones did. I doubt they have much of a plan beyond 3-5 seasons for most series these days.
GoT has an ending and one that generally vibes with GRRM's forward notes. The last season was sloppy in execution, but I can hardly say it wasn't earned. The show was better than the books inside the seasons 4-6.
I am sure that when writers start a show with a multi-season arc, they have a mental map of what they want to tell in each season. Then the studio comes along and cancels the show after they film a cliffhanger or tells them to stretch the final part of the story into 3 more seasons (and then cancels it after the first of the filler seasons flops).
From what I understand, that was not the case for Game of Thrones. Going into the last season, the show still had a great audience and ratings and HBO was eager to keep milking it. It was the writers who insisted on ending the show and had enough clout to get HBO to agree. My assumption is that they ran out of ideas to keep the show going, realized that George R. R. Martin was hoping they would come up with an ending he could use in the books, and resigned on a high trying to get other jobs before the final season ruined their reputations.
they were able to keep fans happy with house of dragons series.
Pepperidge farm remembers when a 'season' was more than 8 40-min episodes.
more than 8 episodes. started in september ended around may. so like around 25 episodes. just give me 25 episodes every year of something like tv shows used to be. new season every year. it shouldn't be hard we had that for years before netflix.
On the one hand, broadcast TV typically had 20-26 episode seasons every year. On the other hand, this often included a lot of filler and could easily lead to huge compromises to get everything done. There will always be trade offs between quantity and quality, and only one of those is contractually obligated.
That being said, I really hate the way streaming has devolved into shows with 8 episodes or less in a season, with some of those episodes being significantly shorter than others, and all of them paced as though they have all the time in the world despite the season being over. That would be awful even if they did release seasons annually and never cancelled things early.
I feel like we figured out the perfect balance with Daredevil season 1. Thirteen really solid episodes, each being exactly as long as they need to be to tell the story they want, and all of them adding up to complete the arc for the season. I could nitpick and criticize some things, but the pacing was absolutely perfect.
Filler or not people felt like they had a relationship with the characters. Now everything is so short and releases so long in between people don't have that.
Being able to binge watch an entire season in one 8-hour workday you've decided to slack off on, is a bit too short. It's what used to be called miniseries.
10-12 hour long episodes was a good sweet spot.
I kind of find older shows with 24 episode seasons painful to rewatch. It just starts to drag. Even shows I like a lot like Star Trek.
Sometimes I break it up a bit between seasons, I imagine being weekly before helped.
having 8 episodes isnt exactly helping as its quite limited and is unable to explore more subplots or potential arcs.
I remember when people used to get so angry that TV shows had 20+ episodes, and were very insistent everything needs to be 13 or less, no fIlLeR! Now we're lucky if we get 10 episodes and 5 seasons. That's basically the equivalent of a long running show (11+ seasons) like Mash or the Big Bang Theory these days.
I don't entirely miss the days of old TV. But outside of what Apple's been putting out (so far they seem to be sticking with their shows; Pluribus and Severance would already be dead in the water on Netflix), it's become impossible to actually enjoy anything now. I loved Star Trek Lower Decks. People who love and hate Star Trek have told me how much they love it. It's a crime it doesn't have more seasons. And that's a long running show by today's standards! There's way too many shows like that now.
20+ episodes per season was real TV. You had good episodes and bad episodes and great episodes. This 10 episode crap is what we used to call a miniseries. More like a stretched out movie than a TV show.
The ratcheting up of budgets and viewer expectations with them has not been good for TV. It’s too high stakes. You’ll never get the brilliance of a Star Trek: TNG bottle show that way.
The same thing has happened to video games. Publishers spend half a billion dollars developing a video game, and then everyone complains that AAA games aren’t taking risks anymore. At least we have indie games to fill the void. There’s nothing like that with TV. YouTube may be great but it’s still a long way off from the old days of TV, except for maybe non fiction stuff (science and documentaries).
10 episodes seems quite rare for most shows now.
Yeah but this 8 episode season has a bigger budget than all the 90s shows together so if it gets fewer than 4 billion viewers the first week it airs the show gets canceled.
New data from Domino's suggests that waiting 16 hours for pizza delivery did not please customers. More at 11:00.
also cancelling seasons after 2 or 3. and haivng only 8-10 episodes which is pathetically small, and is a penny pinching method by streaming companies, they want to avoid paying ACTORS "exorbitant" amount of sums of money.
sandman and Invicible between the 1st-2nd season was abysmally long like 3years. it doesnt take 3 years to make 8 episodes at all.
similarly with orville 6 year and only handful of episodes, one of the leads said it was unaffordable for most people working on the show, to have so long of hiatus. although pallacki said it partially due to mcfarlane writing all of the epsiodes himself.
Re The Orville,
As I understand he's now at least written all the episodes for the next season, now it's just a matter of getting everything together (the equally hard part).
I thought he would stick with The Orville on a regular basis, but maybe once you achieve your dream it's easy to start looking at other projects.
Paramount called his bluff on the Ted live action series (he would only do it if they could have movie level budget for CGI Ted, and they did, for two seasons at least). So I think he jumped at that since it seemed like a limited time offer.
Plus now he's diving back into animation with a Stewie spin-off show and a Ted animated show.
I do hope we get Orville season 4 someday, especially with Star Trek coming to an end (for now).
its probably going to be problematic when some of the actors arnt coming back, like lead pallacki, she said she wont be coming back due to hiatus.
I didn't know he had all those projects going. He's also supposed to be working on a Dungeon Crawler Carl TV show. That's a lot for one person.
My favorite genre of data science is "Fucking Duh."
It's also because a season is only 8 episodes and dumped all at once. You don't have time to digest it. You end up binging the episodes so other people don't spoil it for you, then you easily forget what happened. It's like Netflix purposefully designed their shows to be forgettable.
Well they're certainly being written so people on their phones can understand them.
Ya don't fuggin say... Could have told you that a decade ago...
People move on. Old data proved this decades ago but in the digital world, everything is new again.
Grey’s Anatomy is still the second-most streamed show on TV, despite being over 20 years old.
SpongeBob, Family Guy, and Big Bang Theory remain in the Top 10. We haven't seen a new episode of two of them in over a decade.
I think that speaks more to the lack of originality than aging out, or losing interest in, something. While popular in the broadcasting world numbers I believe a lot of folk moved on (while new folk stopped and stared). Then again, SpongeBob SquarePants has to be an exception to the rule because...well...he's SpongeBob!
Maybe Netflix can commission a study to investigate whether viewers are put off by most of their shows being not very good. They might learn something.
I think you underestimate how much the average person loves to consume utter trash media.
Netflix has no idea or confidence in how to evaluate what a good show is, so they have to wait for user data to tell them.
But of course their shit tier layout makes 80% of their catalogue hard to find, so unless they're really pushing a show a production can easily fall through the cracks.
Yeah I remember always browsing Netflix and seeing the same shit that I had no interest in showing up every time I looked for a show to watch. Shit that I was purposefully ignoring for months and months. But then I learn about an interesting show somewhere else, search for it on Netflix, and find a good show has been somewhere in the shadows the entire time with 4+ seasons and I had never come across it a single time while browsing forever and never finding anything to watch.
I assume that their sort algorithm is trying to balance your interest in a show vs. the licensing fees they will need to pay. Remember, Netflix does not want you to watch all day, every day. They want you to barely get enough value to justify keeping your subscription.
All the shows I am currently into are technically still around; but they haven't put out an episode for several years now. By the time they do release something, I'll have fucking forgot about it. But they'll also only put out 6 fuckin' episodes which leads me to wonder what the hell was going on that whole time? There's no way it took 3 years to film 6 fucking episodes of a show that is just people talking in the same location every time.
Animes are way ahead in this department. They have been releasing those recap episodes for a long time.
On a personal note though, I avoid ongoing works like the plague, because you never know when you are gonna get hooked on a series that stays on a cliffhanger for like 10 years and yes, AoT, I'm looking at you.
I can't speak to the specific show you were thinking of, but it definitely could take that long. TV shows used to be leaner and lower budget, because they had such a fast pace. Nowadays each episode is not far off from a feature film on polish and sometimes length. If each episode is an hour, a 6 episode series is practically 3 feature films-worth of work.
I'd love to see shows go back to that old model of quicker runs with leaner budgets and less fx reliance. Not saying all shows should be that way, but it would be nice to have a mix.
The modern Prestige Television format is more in line with making a movie cut into episodes than making a serial-run TV show.
If you compare, say, the Mandalorian to Xena or Buffy, it's night-and-day different in the actual design and production. Nevermind the post-production with CGI and after-effects. Consider those 6 episodes a two-hour long movie and, yeah, 3 years isn't outrageous.
The Andor series was blowing north of $12M/episode. Go back to 90s-era Buffy and it ran around $2M, by comparison. Xena was being filmed for barely $1M/ea. House of the Dragon was $20M per episode (as compared to $6M/ep for the Season 1 GoT). Consider that The Walking Dead ran a meager $3M its first season, while WandaVision was going through $25M.
Even if it looks like people are just standing and talking, you have to consider whether these people are heavily CGI'd or shooting in a very inhospitable place for filming or whether the people being filmed are commanding enormous salaries (both Friends and Seinfield cast members were demanding north of $500k/ep by the final season).
Yeah, and I'll admit Xena definitely looks kinda wonky today, but that's more because props didn't have to look realistic on a 360i screen. Buffy mostly holds up great. It's campy and you can see the rubberyness of monsters and such, but that doesn't take from it meaningfully. Hell Star Trek TNG on a modern big screen still looks pretty good.
I think Game of Thrones broke the minds of TV execs. Apple TV seems to actually be following the old HBO model of throwing a ton of money at shows and it pays off for Severance and Murderbot, both shows that would've been on HBO 20 years ago. But Netflix was supposed to be the "everyone uses it" type deal. It's just burning so much money on production quality where a lot of shows would be similarly good without it.
I canceled Netflix over the price partly, and over the killing account sharing, but mostly it was because they kept killing shows I liked and weren't putting out nearly enough stuff I wanted to watch to keep me. The price value proposition wasn't there. Also the quality (especially of writing) rapidly approached slop designed by committee.
I couldn't handle the in-app advertisements. That whole year where they kept trying to give me shitty video games was the last straw.
I still haven’t forgiven them for canceling “Kaos”.
It seems almost everybody is pissed off at them for cancelling something. It's not a novel thing to say at this point, but I don't bother with their originals any more.
Of course. Half the shows I've seen I just forget about before I second season comes out, much less a third. If the seasons were longer maybe it would stick in my craw longer.
The "release them all at once so they binge" strategy is also a big part nobody's talking about.
Yeah - I'll binge a show if I'm able because I have no self control, but it's not how they should be watched if you want to keep people engaged. You lose the water cooler talk about last night's episode.
My boss and I have similar tastes in TV, and we rarely discuss Netflix shows because they're flashes we burn through over a weekend. But when episodes of Star Trek or The Pitt are drip-fed to us, we end up talking about them every week.
The Pitt is a highly regarded show (I haven't watched the new Star Trek, so I can't comment), and HBO puts out quality shows time and time again (the wire, sopranos, six feet under, game of thrones, true detective -- except season 2, the leftovers, station eleven, tales from the crypt, veep, curb your enthusiasm, and yada yada). I don't let them drip feed The Pitt to me. I wait until it's all released and then binge it. I like it better that way. The quality is probably why it's water cooler talk. Drip feeding it is more about keeping subscribers for the shareholders than it is for the enjoyment of the viewer.
Now, do I believe The Pitt is as good as its praise? Not really, but that's another conversation. I will say that it has got better as the episodes went on, and has grown into nearly being deserving of its praise.
Netflix churns out steaming piles of garbage time and time again. Even their flagship series(es?) aren't that great. The last two seasons of Stranger Things, for example, were straight up turds -- as was the season where Eleven ran away. I'm not surprised you're not discussing Netflix originals. Obviously there are exceptions, tho they're exceptions (I enjoyed Space Force, what little we got of it).
But if you prefer shows to be drip fed, I'm glad for you -- I bet that method doesn't go away anytime soon.
Myth confirmed.
Well yeah. Turns out putting out a season every year was the best way to keep people invested in your show
even then thats pushing it, because 8 episodes per year isnt exactly staying power for audience. 8 episodes once a year is also quite long, but not as bad as 2 years. it shouldve been 16-20 at the minimum per year.
What is the reason for the long waits anyway? Especially considering that actual runtime of an average season nowadays is 50% or less than what it used to be.
Broadcast/cable TV had a schedule to fill. More than anything else, they needed to fill time slots. They planned around a calendar so annual seasons were only natural. That's also why they tended to have longer seasons, because it's easier to keep viewers coming back on schedule when they are already interested in a show. Plus it's cheaper to to make one long show than two short shows. It leads to brutal production schedules and massive creative compromises, but it fills airtime and that's what counts.
In other words, the economics of old school TV were about filling time while maximizing ratings and minimizing costs, which incentivizes making a smaller number of shows with longer seasons and regular releases.
Streaming has very different incentives. They don't care about filling a schedule, they just want you to subscribe. Every new show is a potential draw, and the more titles they have the more likely it is that one of them will appeal to you. They are incentivized to fill their catalog, not their calendar. As such, there's nowhere near as much pressure to churn out seasons like clockwork. If anything, they probably get more bang for their buck by waiting longer between seasons so that the release of each season is more of an event.
Hell, it doesn't even matter that much if it hurts the show in the long run. As long as they keep getting subscribers and have new shows (or popular old shows) to pull people in, they don't really care if an existing show dies.
that is the companies/studios excuses. its really just to avoid paying the big actors "too much money". 8 episodes isnt exactly a time consuming project, many of the shows on netflix have very poor looking props ery cheaply made, and acting/writing kinda is very bad.
sandman was a good premise but it was too cringey in many of aspects.
mostly because of bigger budgets making scheduling harder. higher profile actors, bigger crews, potential location filming, more time required for effects and post production.
I also heard writing takes longer because it has to be refined and tightened to fit in shorter seasons.
covid and writers strike also made everything worse for a while.
and part of it is probably intentional trying to milk the golden goose for as long as possible. apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Maybe they should stop writing stuff for a second screen, and stop repeating the same thing over and over just in case you where on your phone the first couple of times.
I think it all comes down to netflix not greenlighting layer seasons until the previous one did well, and they release them complete. This means that by the time they decide to do a later season the whole team is working on other stuff.
Basically Netflix is handling business like a tech-bro company without stock, rather than a tv production company.
the silicon valley philosophy is toxic and stupid even for tech, for art/entertainment is basically leprosy.
Amazing how older series were able to produce many more episodes per season, with a more limited budget, and only a few months between them.
The old adage "less is more" comes to mind.
Netflix will use this as an excuse to push more ai slop so they can release seasons faster.
They were going to do that anyway. But also, all the networks have been pivoting towards short form Reality TV for years. You're not even going to get the AI Slop, because even that shit is way too expensive. You're going to get five-minute clips of Desperate Housewives of Topeka Kansas and Powerslap Middleweight Champions: Training Montage Marathon and a gameshow about Howey Mandel writing a number on a piece of paper while a crowd of retirees in Rascal Scooters try to guess it.
I'm amazed the One Piece live action is still going.
I can't believe Twisted Metal got 2 seasons
Glad it did, S2 was better
Once a user is out of the routine, they often don't come back. Weekly episode drops is what you should expect, just like traditional tv.
18 months is about the amount of time it takes me to forget most of the details of a show, and therefore any sense of personal investment in it.
I wonder whether a continuous format would work for modern shows. Like 1 every months. Could develop interesting watching culture if done well.
I think the issue is more the production than the release schedule. If you have a cast, crew, and set all put together but you only plan to use it for eight episodes of filming before they disperse, and that's just the industry model? How long does it take to get the gang back together for the next season?
The old sit-com format, where they churned out 24+ episodes a season (the norm for shows like Full House and Friends), meant continuous production. Once you have everything up and running, churning out that next episode is a marginal cost.
By comparison, to produce a season of Wednesday takes 18 months, from writing to production to filming to post-production to final release. And you only get eight episodes out of it. Rather than immediately rolling into the next season with the people and set you've already assembled, everyone is dispersed. And then it takes another 18 months to build it back up again, once Netflix decides to order another eight episodes.
What they're trying to do with Wednesday is certainly higher budget per episode, with a much higher level of post-production work and movie-quality effects / lighting / etc. But the sporadic nature of the work means you're losing inertia in the actual film making.
That's a great point. I also suspect that the stability of the work led to less expense in hiring because people aren't having to negotiate with as frequent gaps in employment in mind.
Yeah, hard to believe there were shows where you could literally see kids in them growing up because they were filming consistently. Like Home Improvement, Malcolm in the Middle, and Full House.
These days, having kids in the show means season 2 needs to jump ahead in time because the kids are way older by the time it starts filming.
Though I will also take a step back and acknowledge that the entire concept of child actors on a long running show is dubious, especially with more intense directors/producers.
Don't think you could hold actors to that kind of schedule. They'd end up with countless delays for scheduling conflicts.
No they still film in seasons or whatever schedule but release is distributed witb larger gaps
As long as I hear about a second season, I'll watch if it's a show I liked. It can be years later. For instance, Party Down got a third season 13 years after season two.
Hearing about it is the trick, though, because I block ads and don't subscribe. So, they don't GAF about me anyway.
And it was pretty good, too! I'm so grateful that unexpected third season didn't taint the show's legacy.
Listen to me, all your series are shit anyway. I stopped counting how many shows I gave a try because someone told that this one was dope. I'm amazed by what people find so cool. The one with the doctor? Lame. The one with the professor who cooks drugs? Maybe two half good ideas and then pfff ten seasons of crap on autopilot. Etcetera, etcetera
What TV do you like?
The only good one I've seen so far is "The Wire". Almost all the rest of it was not only less good but bad. I remember towards the beginning of this trend, everybody was watching "Lost", 15 years later or so I watched the first episode. It was so intellectually indigent that I really can't get why it had been such a success. I mean, it really sucks! Or the problem is me at parties, all that?
E'd some typos
So you referenced Breaking Bad, and you think that's bad too?
You ever think it's just, for the most part, TV apparently isn't for you - rather than it all being bad?
TV, like the internet, should have been a fantastic medium for learning things, for news or entertainment, but it's been strictly controlled, placed under the stranglehold of the owner class as soon it realized its potential.
I mean it takes money to make TV series? I think there's plenty of great modern TV series.
I'm happy to learn that the current state of TV and of that industry pleases you. I supose we don't have much left to say to each other, though.
I'm curious as to what kind of TV series you would like to see, or imagine would or should exist in your ideal world where the industry hasn't been tainted.
Some of the most popular and awarded shows in the history of television and they’re trash to you. You must be fun at parties
Babe, the movie with the little pig earned plethora of awards too. I wouldn't compare it to a Beethoven's symphony, though.
Ohhhhh so you're one of those people that likes taking something culturally significant from history that you know is appreciated by people who are into that type of art (in this instance, music) and then boast that you know about that and say examples of completely unrelated art (in this case, TV shows) are just not as good, hoping people will find you intellectually superior or something.
I also must say, I don't get all this hype for this Eminem guy. Just wouldn't compare his music to Dante's Inferno, you know?
Most people crave filler. That's why they watch TV in the first place. They want something to waste their time on.
Do you read fictional books or play narrative-driven games?
Presumably thats why Silo shot season 3 and 4 back-to-back, and is releasing season 4 about 9-10 months after season 3 ended, as opposed to the 2 years that most streaming shows put between seasons.
i wonder if they suddenly realized it? but its too late, apple tv+ seems to be pulling back some of it shows.
No shit, Sherlock. Everyone has been complaining about that since Stranger Things season 2.
Season 2 was the last Stranger Things I watched, and even then I watched it years after it was released.
Another finding from the Duh Hickey Institute
Immediate reward addiction finally showing in a way the general public can't overlook.
Fuck netflix, everything about them screams "we just want money".
Just like every other streaming playform btw.
Did Upload ever get it's final second half of its last season? That fucking cliffhanger angered me to no end.
Im still waiting on setting up a media server so i can properly pirate anything i would like to watch from netflix.
Don't wait! Start with you're current computer/laptop. Get used to it.
Fair enough, its more like waiting to learn enough to acrually get it done/take the time to do it.
Cries in anime
Crying like an anime fan on prom night!!
There used to be a time I hoped Netflix would pick up The Last Man On Earth and now I hope they never find out it exists bc they'll just make it worse somehow.
Entitled fucks
And that's years after I read that script writers have no time to do a good job. Does not sound promising at all