And all the other numbers tie back to this. No one wants to invest in a story that ends on a cliffhanger to not be renewed or even worse to get season 2 that is >50% filler because the writers save up for 5 seasons and then season 2 ends on a cliffhanger to never be renewed.
It's all got too much sprawl and poorer production value now. Good riddance
They've been making content now for a long time, Lilyhammer came out in 2012.
They had all the data telling them that long lived series that built dedicated followings like The Office, Friends, Star Trek, etc. were reasons that people stayed on the platform.
They had 14 years to put together their own dynasty series, shows that people could connect with over the years that would become their comfort shows that they could return to again and again, fully owned by Netflix and completely locked in their walled garden.
Instead they pursued a strategy of starting a thousand promising ideas but if they didn't instantly take off, done. No room for a show to grow and mature and develop, you better have a great first season and you might get a second.
And I think everyone I know has at least one show on Netflix that they got invested in only for it to get axed with a dozen unresolved story threads. I think the one that made me go "why bother?" was Santa Clarita Diet. A funny dramatic show with star power, Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, interesting character development, a 3 season run and then just killed.
It wasn't the first series they killed with a dozen loose threads dangling, but it was the last one I watched. At first I told myself, "I might watch another series after it goes the distance and I know they won't just leave it half-finished" but that quickly just turned into "I don't watch netflix produced series" and as they lost more and more of their licensed content "I don't watch netflix" and this month I realized I was still handing them nearly $30 a month for nothing and canceled.
I think about a lot of the most popular shows and how bad their first seasons are. But audiences like to see characters grow and that's a big part of what causes people to connect with a show and want to come back to it again and again.
HBO’s priority was to tell excellent stories with big budgets and charge slightly more than average.
Netflix’s priority was to tell stories excellently with big budgets and charge as much as was necessary to accelerate growth in revenue y-o-y.
HBO was really damn good at picking great stories to show us. (Maybe not so great at winding them up before they jump the shark, but we have the trope because humans suck at that universally.) Netflix seemingly believed in its recommendation algorithm so strongly that they let it pick stories for them — but most recommendation engines wear thin, and trying to make a movie from ‘Latinx Moody Deadpan’ or ‘Cooking Biography 4K’ only works so many times before viewers realize that the content is just like the recommendations: a ‘false front’ designed to make Netflix seem like it can pick an entire theater full of stories, that wears off rapidly once you exhaust the algorithm’s top picks. Today, I cannot think of any modern flashy topic-generated Netflix thing that is as strong a story as HBO’s Westworld — or Hulu’s Palm Springs. Whatever their flaws, they’re compelling stories, that you can’t just pick out of an algorithm envelope; Netflix’s are, uniformly, not.
Letterboxd exists now as an immune response to this artificial theater, proof that humans are better at picking recommendations given a starting point than Netflix’s billion dollars of algorithms, and that humans are willing to congregate around something made with good taste. It used to be a sign of social status to have an HBO subscription, and now it’s a sign of social status to earn lots of likes on Letterboxd. In both cases, that social status stems directly from the excellence of curation, whether of what movies to make or of what movies to see. For the categories of curation and respect and social signaling, Netflix and The Algorithm doesn’t earn a single nomination.
Netflix put me off of TV as a whole category, which is a pretty great thing, really.
I keep meaning to watch Arcane season two, but the first one was so dense (not necessarily plot, but just so many little things) that I know I would be cheating myself to watch it after the sizeable gap. Yet rewatching S1 just to start S2 is such a time commitment.
It doesn't matter why that is. It only matters that they put their money to something that does keep people subscribing.
If they don't have the creative wherewithal, that's a different problem. It's hard to feed the gaping maw of people seeking entertainment. They hold everything they watch to the highest standards -- TV shows that cost $10 million per hour, and movies that cost $100 million per hour.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/predictions-on-the-future-of...
They must be really desperate to artificially boost viewer numbers.
They measured the wrong thing because it was easier for them.
Some of the most important things can't be measured.
The future can't actually be pre-computed, the forecast isn't the terrain, it isn't even the map.
Netflix has internally treated their employees like machines for a long time and they treat their "content" the same way.
Working down the list:
- Night Agent: S1 2023-March, S2 2025-January => 2 years
- One Piece: S1 2023-August, S2 2026-March => 3 years
- Four Seasons: S1 2025-May, S2 2026-May => 1 year
- Running Point: S1 2025-March, S2-2026-April => 1 year
- Beef: S1 2023-April, S2 2026-April => 3 years
There is a reason "You cannot account for taste." is a phrase.
Parks and Recreation 5.97 million 4.60 million
Twin Peaks 18.2 million 10.2 million
Arrested Development 6.2 million 5.7 million
Friday Night Lights 6.1 million 5.5 million
Seinfeld 15.6 million 12.5 million (so low it was put on hiatus mid season, these are bad numbers for the time period)
Even shows like Scrubs were considered a failure because even though their 2nd season numbers went up, it was only because they were put on after friends, their 3rd season saw a massive drop even though they stayed in the "after friends" timeslot. Their 3rd season is effectively their second season from an exposure/retention standpoint.
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/netflix-q4-2025-financial-e...
And until this week, they would release numbers every six months. Now they are NOT releasing numbers.
If the numbers were up, they would post them.
This sudden change of Netflix' reporting shows they decided it is less bad to raise the flag of halting reporting than to expose the size of the subscriber loss. That is not good. Maybe they are just fearful of showing any loss at all, or maybe it is a really large loss. Eventually, we'll know something.
[deleted]