Has one of your favorite shows on a streaming platform been canceled? If not, count yourself lucky. But if so, welcome to the club! It seems like every time I watch a show I genuinely love and connect to, it ends gets canceled a month later. After years of experiencing this, I decided to investigate this phenomenon to figure out what viewers can do to help our favorite shows get renewed.
The initial root of the problem stems from shows transitioning from broadcast to streaming. Before streaming, the creator of a successful TV show — the person who develops a significant part of the show’s plot, characters and pilot script — would earn money mainly from advertising and syndication. Streaming services, for the most part, didn’t have as many ads as broadcast. To make up for the lack of ad revenue, showrunners for streaming services earn bonuses for each new season of their show, but they are only paid said bonuses if their shows get more seasons. If their show doesn’t get more seasons, they are then not compensated as they would have been with ad revenue.
Initially, this system seemed great for creators because like the old TV model, they only really made a profit if their show was successful. The new system offers a bigger pay up front, but it doesn’t allow for creators to be paid more if their show becomes a big success. Instead, streaming services promise bonuses for each following season of a show, which could range from a $250,000 bonus for a second season all the way up to potentially a $1.7 million bonus for a fourth season.
While it is ideal for creators, streaming services have managed to escape paying creators these large amounts of money by simply canceling shows after only a couple seasons. This means great shows don’t get the opportunity to be completed, and creators don’t get nearly as much money as was proposed to them.
Shows are also getting canceled due to the abundance of streaming services available. When Netflix started out, it relied a lot on debt financing: borrowing money from financers to fund its projects. This method allowed Netflix to produce a variety of shows catering to more niche groups, with shows such as “Orange Is the New Black,” “Marco Polo,” and “Sense8.” However, as more and more streaming services were created and Netflix met with more competition, it had to change its strategy in order to continue making a profit. The company began creating shows that would appeal to a wide range of people and gain higher viewership, such as “The Crown,” “Ozark,” and “Bridgerton.” This shift also changed the way it determined which shows got renewed. Today, Netflix almost solely relies on viewership numbers to gather if a show has a large enough audience and is worth investing in for more seasons.
The problem with this renewal strategy is that streaming services are also incredibly oversaturated. It would be almost impossible to watch every single show on one streaming service, let alone all the streaming services out there. This means shows just can’t attain the amount of viewership they used to because there’s too many shows to be watched. This has made getting shows renewed almost impossible, even with incredibly strong fan bases and good performances.
This issue especially affects shows portraying meaningful diversity. This year, 18 diverse shows, that included purposeful and significant storylines about people of color, queer people, trans people, and disabled people, such as “Our Flag Means Death,” “Dead Boy Detectives” and “Rap Sh!t.,” have already been canceled across streaming services, despite having very strong fan bases. Diverse shows are typically targeted within these cancellations because they tend to have smaller audiences. People usually gravitate toward relatable shows so the target audience, a marginalized community, provides a much smaller audience, putting them at a disadvantage.
Even if these shows have a smaller audience, I would argue their fan bases are much stronger than some shows that have been given more seasons than them (“Emily in Paris” I’m looking at you). I think streaming services need to start not only considering viewership numbers but also the strength of the fan base surrounding a show. Fan bases can offer something special, but also very useful, which is viewership retention. Yes, a show may get very high viewership on its first season but if it doesn’t have a strong fan base, who’s to say how much of that audience will return to watch future seasons?
For shows with strong, passionate fans, it’s almost guaranteed they will have very high viewership retention and gain new fans as seasons progress. For example, the show “Our Flag Means Death” may not have had the highest viewership on Max ever, but the second season totaled 45 times the average demand for a series within its first 10 days of release, and now audience demand for “Our Flag Means Death” is 19.9 times the demand of an average TV show in the US. To put this into context, only 2.7% of all shows in the US have that level of demand. And yet, the show was canceled because it didn’t have high enough viewership.
Clearly streaming services don’t really care about the importance of these shows to fans, and rather only care about making a profit, as they all continue to cancel beloved shows actually impacting people’s lives while investing so much into shows that have no apparent impact on people (still looking at you “Emily in Paris”). I understand that we all need simple shows like these to put on at the end of a long day and to not think too much about. However, I still don’t understand how these shows are placed far above shows that have genuinely saved people’s lives by having characters go through struggles that audiences can relate to and see them find the light in the situation.
While this situation is very frustrating, especially when it means fans never get to see the end of the stories they care for so deeply, it is still within our power as viewers to save these shows.
The most effective way: increasing the viewership on your favorite shows. If you watch a show and you really like it and want another season, the best way to give it a shot at renewal is to watch it as much as you can. As someone who is not a big re-watcher, I kind of hate that the only way I can get my favorite shows renewed is by watching them an ungodly amount of times, but unfortunately, that is the best way to get shows renewed.
If you do get sick of watching a show, you can always leave it on in the background while doing other things. While this seems kind of silly, again, it will genuinely help increase viewership. You can also recommend the show to others and talk about it on social media. This will enhance the reach of the show, which in turn will also increase its viewership by enlarging its audience. These are pretty simple things, but they have the potential to greatly increase viewership on your favorite shows, which is the best way to give them a chance at getting renewed.
If a show you loved has already been cancelled, unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do. You can always email or call streaming services and networks to express your desire for certain shows to get renewed. Very passionate fans have often led campaigns to try to get shows renewed or picked up by other streaming services. This has very rarely worked in the past, even when fans have gone as far as renting billboards in Times Square. Nevertheless, if enough people voice their disappointment with streaming services, it is possible to change the way shows get renewed, so that streaming services actually consider strong, passionate fan bases instead of only focusing on profits.
Either way, it is in our power as viewers to get our favorite shows renewed, as long as we can increase viewership and make our voices heard.
