It is time that we have a discussion about
cancel culture.
No, not that kind.
Streaming TV, which once seemed to be
infinitely expanding, is experiencing shrinkage. Even before the writers and actors
strikes threatened the pipeline of new series, Max saw a round of cost-cutting
cancellations including the “Gossip Girl” reboot, “Minx” (later saved by Starz)
and a completed “Batgirl” movie. Amazon Prime Video has thrown the likes of “A
League of Their Own” and “The Peripheral” overboard. Disney+ recently
pre-canceled its already made children’s fantasy adaptation, “The Spiderwick
Chronicles.” Hulu’s acclaimed Russian monarchy comedy “The Great” has been
deposed. A string of high-profile Netflix cancellations has become the stuff of
protests and memes.
اضافة اعلان
With all this has come a new belief: That
TV series are now being canceled at an unprecedented rate, and you can’t count
on any show sticking around anymore. Netflix, a recent piece in Cinemablend
said, “seems to cancel its original shows with unjustified speed and
harshness,” with many series lasting only “one or two seasons.”
I have had my heart broken enough over the
years by enough cancellations to sympathize with disappointed fans. But to
paraphrase a series that did get a full run: Oh, my sweet summer children, what
do you know about premature cancellation?
The streaming era, in truth, has nothing on
the bloodbaths of the regular-old-TV era. There was a period in my lifetime —
and unless you are a precocious grade-schooler, your lifetime too — when it was
not only not unusual for series to get the ax after Season 1, it was the norm.
Let’s take 2011-12, the last broadcast TV
season to begin before Netflix entered the original-series business with
“Lilyhammer” in 2012. At the time, only around one-third of new broadcast
series made it past their first seasons. Of the rest, many were yanked mid-run,
with no warning, before even airing all the episodes they’d shot.
A few series that season would go on for
healthy runs: “New Girl,” “Scandal,” “Last Man Standing.” But a scan of the
premiere list is a sea of red ink and broken dreams. “Terra Nova,” the
expensive dinosaur flop on Fox, was extinct by December. ABC’s “Work It,” about
men who dressed as women to land jobs in a bad economy, was fired after two
episodes. “Pan Am,” “How to Be a Gentleman,” “I Hate My Teenage Daughter,”
dead, dead, dead.
This was not, in retrospect, a great season
of network TV (we can thank or blame it for “Smash,” which actually got a
second season). But it was not an unusual one either. Networks’ standard
procedure was to hurl pilots toward success like sperm toward an egg. Most
would not make it. (Some special shows, like Fox’s racy 1999 high school drama
“Manchester Prep,” the first TV series set I ever visited as a critic, were
canceled before airing a single episode.)
Cancellation, in those days, was not a
disappointed assessment made after seeing the performance of a full season. It
was summary execution in the street. One Thursday, you were strutting your
stuff opposite “The Office”; the next, nothing was left but a grease spot and a
“Big Bang Theory” rerun.
And even if you survived a first season,
your eventual end would usually not offer closure. It was just lights out, and
not the artsy “Sopranos” kind. Having a show “end on its own terms” was not an
expectation; it was a freaking event. “Cheers,” “Seinfeld,” “Lost” — for these
series to air planned finales that wrapped up their stories (or tried to) was
unusual enough to merit wall-to-wall media coverage.
Nor was a small, intense niche of fans
enough to save a show. To love daring, out-of-the-box TV back then was to have
loved and lost, to see an innovative show premiere and think, “Yeah, that’s
totally getting canceled.” And usually you would be right. “Freaks and Geeks.”
“My So-Called Life.” “Firefly.” I have scars, my friend.
Of course, in the broadcast era you got
these shows for free — or for “free” if you didn’t count buying your TV set and
the time invested in watching Un skippable commercials. But that meant that you
got the level of certainty that you paid for — and what the advertising
revenues didn’t pay for, you didn’t get.
Like cable before it, streaming promised to
change the game. Netflix and its competition tended to wait longer to pull the
plug in the early days. As with everything in TV, there were business reasons
for this. They operated more like tech companies, willing to bleed money to
establish first-mover advantage. And because they were building libraries of
original programming (to be less dependent on acquisitions), they were
motivated to be patient.
Now these platforms have gotten bigger, and
there are more of them. Wall Street has become insistent on growth and returns.
And that means that the new era of TV has turned to an old TV-business
strategy: cut, cut, cut.
But not only have Netflix, Max and the rest
not invented the practice of killing shows, they are still relative amateurs at
it. A 2023 study by The Wrap found that Netflix formally canceled a mere 11
percent of its new shows, far below the broadcast rate. (The analysis did note
that Netflix airs many single-season “limited series” that might have been, er,
less limited had more people watched them.)
Now that we have the
old-man-yelling-at-cloud part of this out of the way: Some things are genuinely
different today. One is that streaming platforms, and to some extent cable,
simply make fewer episodes of everything, including their biggest hits.
But maybe the biggest difference today lies
in viewers’ expectations. The implicit promise of streaming platforms was to
empower viewers. You’d watch what you wanted when you wanted, and you would get
the shows broadcast TV wouldn’t make, with the closure it rarely provided.
Today’s “Netflix/Max/Amazon cancels
everything!” outrage may be the product of a relatively short historical period
of subsidized patience. But you can’t entirely blame subscribers for expecting
things to stay that way.
Meanwhile, where streaming once promised an
endless video vault, lately canceled series like “Westworld” and “Willow” have
been pulled from the services’ libraries altogether. Not being able to watch a
canceled show is also nothing new, of course; once the ax fell in the
pre-streaming era, the reruns were accessible only on VHS or DVD or, more
likely, in your memory.
That, again, was assumed to be the deal.
Easy come, easy go. Now that TV has won similar status to art forms like film
and literature, you’d think it would have a similar permanence, or should.
Yes, it costs real money — in residual and
licensing payments, for instance — to keep an old series available on
streaming. Viewers may not be aware of the cost. But they are aware that
they’re paying $10 a month and up (and up and up …) per service. It’s only
reasonable for them to ask what they’re getting.
Streaming platforms like to tout themselves
as disrupters and innovators. Cancellations, instead, are one more means by
which they are re-creating TV’s oldest practices — albeit with a twist. TV has
always found ways to break our hearts. The difference now is that it’s found
new ways to make us pay for the privilege.
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