New Data Suggests Long Waits Between Seasons Are Hurting Viewership on Netflix Hits
(www.whats-on-netflix.com)
Skavau to 
Television
Myth confirmed.
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).
Fuck netflix, everything about them screams "we just want money".
Just like every other streaming playform btw.
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.
Immediate reward addiction finally showing in a way the general public can't overlook.
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
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’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.
Can confirm, my dad watched it and loved it and he's not an anime guy in the slightest.
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...
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
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
Either it never gets finished or it finishes long after it should've.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The showrunners expected 6 or 7 seasons for “for all mankind”: https://collider.com/for-all-mankind-seven-season-plan-writers-comments/
The skuttlebutt is there's a spinoff coming too. Based on a new book coming out.
So we will see. Either way good stuff.
To be fair, Y the Last Man was a terrible show
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.
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
that seems irrelevant to this issue. this is about people who do initially watch that lose interest.
My favorite genre of data science is "Fucking Duh."
Another finding from the Duh Hickey Institute
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.
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.
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.
10 episodes seems quite rare for most shows 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).
Did people pay to investigate that? Because, uh, fucking duh
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.
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?
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.
they could probably write out a more robust series.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Til, well thank you
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 still haven’t forgiven them for canceling “Kaos”.
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.
Sure but the problem for Netflix is that there is a lot of trash media that doesn’t cost 20 dollars a month.
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.
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.
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.
Did Upload ever get it's final second half of its last season? That fucking cliffhanger angered me to no end.
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.
For instance, Party Down got a third season 13 years after season two.
And it was pretty good, too! I'm so grateful that unexpected third season didn't taint the show's legacy.
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.
