There’s a simple reason Netflix cancels shows so quickly

Everyone remembers the first time their favourite TV show got the axe. Mine was Sugar Rush, Channel 4’s mid-Noughties teen lesbian drama starring Lenora Crichlow and a pre-fame Andrew Garfield. When it was cancelled in 2006, allegedly due to Channel 4 having to offset the £180m they’d paid for the rights to four more years of Big Brother, I was furious. I’m sure I made regrettable posts about Jade Goody and Brian Dowling on the Digital Spy forums. That said, I was also about 14, and grieving the abrupt end of a TV show is a modern rite of passage.

Today, though, the cancellation of a new series tends to be met by illogical screaming from people who really ought to know better. Take Kaos, Netflix’s satirical spin on Greek mythology, which launched in August. No matter that it received largely positive reviews – and the presence of stars including Jeff Goldblum, Janet McTeer and David Thewlis – it was this week brought to a close after just one season. Understandably, its fans were upset. “Are you f***ing kidding me?” one asked in a viral tweet. “This show was brilliant and ended on a huge cliffhanger.” Petitions have been launched to rescue it, while others have pledged to halt their Netflix subscriptions in protest.

But despite the noise, viewership figures released this week also suggest too few people were actually watching Kaos. A total of 825 million minutes of the show were watched in its first week of release, a figure that sank by 52 per cent in its second week. Compare that, if you will, to the viewership for Nicole Kidman’s mystery series The Perfect Couple, which was released concurrently with Kaos: 1.91 billion minutes watched in its first week, followed by 1.97 billion in its second. See what I mean?

There are lots of issues with this particular outcome. Kaos was inventive and endearingly goofy, with plenty of room to creatively grow. The Perfect Couple was full of bad wigs, indecipherable accents and an inexplicable amount of Meghan Trainor on the soundtrack. That it did significantly better in terms of numbers is depressing. Series can get away with having barely anyone watch them – just look at the ratings-challenged likes of Mad Men or Succession – but require substantial media goodwill and a litany of awards to make up for it. Kaos didn’t receive enormous traction in the press beyond a review or interview or two, and never quite seemed like it’d get any Emmy love, either. What it needed more than anything were eyes on it.

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Fundamentally, the show’s cancellation points to how little online buzz tends to translate to actual success, and that a loud if not particularly vast fanbase can mask what is, actually, a non-starter of a TV show. This confusion may, simply, come down to how long it takes for data to be gathered in the streaming age. Since its inception, Netflix has dumped entire seasons of scripted television at once, accelerating the act of viewer consumption. If a series gets released on a Friday, chances are you’ve made it through much of the season by Monday morning, and by then decided whether or not you’re a fan.

Netflix viewership figures, though, take time to collate – Kaos’s were released a month after the show arrived on the streamer – leaving actual audiences in a kind of hermetically sealed TV bubble. You might see people talk about the show on social media. You might even chat about it with others in reality. But there’s little sense of how well it’s been received outside of your own purview.

This is something particularly unique to streaming. Traditional television figures – of the BBC or ITV variety – come through a day after a show has been broadcast. Album sales take about six days to be counted. A film is marked a hit or a flop the weekend it’s out. Just last week, in fact, the risible comic-book sequel Joker: Folie à Deux was declared – via daily box office receipts – shaky on Thursday evening, in trouble by Friday night, and all but dead by Sunday afternoon. With traditional forms of entertainment, you quickly know where people stand.

But with a series like Kaos, everything but the numbers are on fast-forward: the show is watched speedily, a fanbase comes together speedily, and cancellation is announced speedily. And because unhinged paranoia is society’s current default response to any slight disruption of the status quo – from tornadoes to Diddy to the shrinking of Freddos – conspiracy theories abound. Did Netflix not have faith in Kaos from day one? Did they want to cancel it? Did they deliberately do nothing to promote it?

But, no: it was just because not enough people watched it. Just as, for a suite of Netflix execs, it’s financially wiser to produce eight seasons of point-and-shoot reality TV like Selling Sunset than an expansive, starry sci-fi extravaganza. And just as the reason Laura Dern’s new, Under the Tuscan Sun-style romcom Lonely Planet isn’t being promoted on my Netflix homepage is because I’m, demographically speaking, a thirtysomething male and not a middle-aged mum. I merely have the taste of one.

Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe, an elaborate conspiracy is not at work, and a curtailed TV show is just a curtailed TV show. Except Sugar Rush, of course. That was different and I stand by it.