this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Movies and TV Shows
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It is bizarre to me that people act like streaming services invented the concept of canceling series after just one season, or believe that it's a new practice. Broadcast TV has regularly done exactly the same thing for its entire history. Streaming services almost always at least release all the episodes rather than leaving some of them unaired.
I think if you were to chart the number of single season series over the years, you'd likely find that streaming media has exponentially more cancelled shows after one series because it's easier for them to monitor engagement of the series by viewers and cut the fat when they think a show won't succeed based on the metric data they have.
Can you imagine shows like Stargate SG1? They most likely would have been cancelled after season1 because the viewer count wasn't there at the start of the series.
I actually did run some numbers on this at one point and found that the cancellation rate on network shows has ranged from 30-50% for the last 70 years, with the average number of seasons hovering just under 2. Reddit post with graphs and sources.
Running the same numbers for streaming services is trickier, and I couldn't figure out a reliable way to get a good data set to analyze. But even so, the numbers for broadcast TV are high enough that it would be numerically impossible for streaming services to, say, be 3 times more likely to cancel a show after one season.