In December, fans of the Netflix fantasy series Warrior Nun learned that their favourite show had been cancelled after just two seasons. They did not take the news quietly. Billboards appeared in New York and London, sporting the slogan #SaveWarriorNun. Another, in Los Angeles, now faces Netflix HQ. This highly organised fan campaign has raised thousands of dollars in order to fund protests against the show being axed, and a petition calling for Warrior Nun to get a third season now has well over 100,000 signatures.
Warrior Nun has a particularly devoted set of fans who are making a lot of noise about its demise. While their viewers are not so vocal, plenty of other series are facing cancellation, after two seasons if they’re lucky, or one, if they’re not. Some have even ended for good on a cliffhanger, leaving fans of Apple TV+’s Mosquito Coast, for example, with no resolution and no way of finding out what happened next
“Cancellation is so hot right now,” notes pop culture site Vulture, at the top of a long and growing list of recently fallen shows. The blockbuster-esque Westworld, a spectacle that never quite reconciled itself with the need for a proper story, has gone after four increasingly incomprehensible seasons. The rebooted Gossip Girl has gone. Avenue 5, gone. 1899, gone. US network Showtime went on a culling spree, axing Let The Right One In and American Gigolo, and dropping Three Women, the adaptation of the Lisa Taddeo bestseller starring Shailene Woodley, before it even made it to screens.
Once, television shows might have been given more time to find their feet and grow an audience. The first season of Mad Men had low viewing figures, and it was never a ratings smash, though that didn’t stop it from getting seven seasons and a place in the pantheon of all-time greats. In the data-driven streaming age, however, there is an instant-gratification ruthlessness in the air. “We have never cancelled a successful show,” Netflix chief executive Ted Sarandos told Bloomberg recently, in response to a question about the outrage that appears online whenever a cult show is dropped. “A lot of these shows were well-intended but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget.” In other words – it’s not me, it’s you.
It is a scathing analysis, but this has been a long time coming. We have been far along the path to peak TV for a long time now. As more streaming services demanded our cash, they threw everything at the wall to get it. Big budgets, A-list stars, esteemed movie directors, eight hours, 10 hours, 13 hours. It was impossible to keep up with all the top-quality stuff being churned out, no matter how many grizzled detectives decided to tackle their personal issues in a down-on-its-luck small town.
Even hardened TV fans (and critics) simply could not keep up with it all, and there were certainly evenings when I opted for a quick burst of a comforting old favourite sitcom rather than another feat of viewing endurance. Given the popularity of heritage content such as Friends, clearly I am not the only one.
That was before the cost of living crisis, which has led many households to cut back on their spending and caused streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+ to report their first drops in subscriber numbers. Inevitably, a tightening of the belts will follow – Netflix has already announced two rounds of job cuts – and that means less-popular shows will go, particularly if they are expensive to make.
Popularity is easier to define with numbers than it is with acclaim. What critics like and what audiences want are often different, which may be why a series such as the meta TV industry spoof Reboot, for example, failed to make it past its first year, despite positive reviews, while the baffling Emily in Paris was renewed for a fourth season long before its third even appeared.
I don’t wish to give false hope to the Warrior Nun fans, given that Netflix’s cancellation appears to be pretty final, but there have been some fairytale endings. Black Mirror was originally on Channel 4, but after two series and a Christmas special, it made the move to Netflix and became an international hit. More recently, the frothy and amiable Minx, about a woman who founds a pornographic magazine for women in the 1970s, was canned by HBO Max, before Starz stepped in to rescue it for a second season.
The much liked but little watched catering comedy Party Down was cancelled in 2010 after just two seasons, in part because two of its stars, Jane Lynch and Adam Scott, had gone to more successful shows (Glee and Parks and Recreation, respectively), but also because nobody really watched it. This week, after 13 years away, it returns, in the hope of finding a bigger audience at last.
Rebecca Nicholson is a columnist for the Observer and the Guardian
