Losing your favourite new show right in the thick of the action is surely the worst nightmare for every TV fan – and it’s increasingly becoming a reality. Earlier this week, another one bit the dust, when it was confirmed that Netflix show Kaos would not be returning for a second season, denying viewers a resolution to its story.
The news, coming just a month after its original premiere on Netlix, is just one scrapping among many, amid a depressing period for television. A few weeks prior, Prime Video hit My Lady Jane was also sent to the chopping block, prompting an outpouring of dismay among its loyal fans (its star Edward Bluemel resorted to posting pictures of ‘sad horses’ on social media. If you know you know). And Star Wars’ show The Acolyte was cancelled the same week by Disney+, amid dismal ratings and review bombing.
There are countless other casualties. Netflix has cancelled shows like The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself and Lockwood & Co after just one season… and the list goes on.
It means that, these days, falling in love with a TV show is a dangerous game – and it certainly feels like projects are getting cancelled almost faster than they’re being green-lit?
For Dr Faye Woods, the Associate Professor in Film and Television at the University of Reading, this is just a natural consequence of the streaming boom: triggered by then-emerging organisations like Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV+ all seeking to make their mark on the industry in the last ten years by green-lighting hundreds of new programmes.
“We had masses and masses of new television, it was just being pumped out by all these new streamers trying to compete with each other,” she says.
To start with, throwing money at new shows to see what would stick was common sense. After all, streamers had their shareholders on board, and it was a chance to lure in subscribers with exciting new content. Every so often, a wild punt like Sex Education would become a megahit: more than enough to justify the cost of it being created.
Of course, the good times haven’t lasted.
When Covid-19 hit, things slowed right down. Restrictions made filming expensive and difficult, so the same volume of shows weren’t being made – and once the industry was out of the pandemic, a slowdown in advertising revenue, combined with a bottoming-out in subscriber numbers, plus the TV writers’ strike, were a triple-whammy to investors’ bottom lines.
For Tim Westcott at Omdia, the slowdown is to do with many of these streamers reaching a point in their lifecycle where they need to become profitable.
“Now they've reached maturity, they're trying to make a profit, and they’re reining back their investment on the original content,” he says.
And that means cutting back on making new TV – as well as being brutal about cutting out what doesn’t make the grade in terms of precious viewing figures. If it’s not drawing eyeballs, the thinking goes, then it’s not worth the cost of its investment.
Both My Lady Jane and The Acolyte failed to draw in viewers in the numbers that Prime Video or Disney were hoping for: My Lady Jane failed to hit the top 10 in TV monitoring site Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings, while The Acolyte sank and vanished from the cultural consciousness almost as soon as it aired.
For the streamers, says Woods, the thinking goes, “‘Is it a hit? Is it hitting straight away?’ With the studios, they've gotten to the point where [a show] has to be huge on its opening weekend otherwise, it's a failure… there isn't the time to see if it's going to find an audience and because they have such a huge amount of stuff, they're not going to go out and promote it or wait and see [if it does well].”
And that means shows that would have made the grade five or ten years ago are no longer cutting it. Stuff like My Lady Jane? That was probably given the go-ahead several years ago, when the industry was looking healthier. “All the things that we're seeing now is television, that was greenlit in a previous era of television,” says Woods.
“Something like Shogun was greenlit in like 2019, so that's an example of very long lead time in television. But even stuff that's happening now is stuff that was greenlit in a time where the streamers were trying to stamp their mark on the television system.”
Now, that glut of shows is coming to an end. And in an age where advertising revenue is smaller than it used to be, and viewer eyeballs are stretched between more streamers and TV channels than ever before, execs are going back to tried and tested ways of attracting customers to pay subscriber fees.
That means “going back to the medical show, going back to procedurals, that kind of stuff,” says Woods – as well as tapping into existing franchises that viewers already know and love.
After all, why waste money on a new writer or bonkers new idea when you could make another Marvel TV show (there have already been almost ten)? Or indeed a Game of Thrones one: several new spin-offs are in development following the success of House of the Dragon.
Does this mean we’ll be seeing fewer TV shows on our screens going forward? For Woods, the answer is yes: expect less to watch TV, and less variety.
“Oh yes, there’s going to be much less television,” she says. “If you look at the industry at the moment, people who work below the line are really struggling because not a lot of television is being made now... the sector as a whole, it’s really retracting.”
Dire news all around: maybe there’s something to be said for classic TV after all. Time to break open the Friends boxset... at least the show wrapped up on its own terms.
