Like everything else in television, streaming has fundamentally changed the way series are cancelled.
While it’s now easier than ever for cancelled shows to find a new home on another platform or be resurrected by popular demand, the promise of the streaming era as a new age of creative freedom and constant availability has given way to shows being pulled from platforms, second season orders being cancelled and, in one case, a completed freshman series being dumped before it even aired.
Meanwhile, the original disruptor, Netflix, has seen its public image shift from that of a renegade TV resurrector to an axe-wielding slasher ready to cancel viewers’ favourite shows at a moment’s notice. But does Netflix, or any other streamer, really cancel shows more often than the rest?
“The Show Must Go Off,” a new special report from Luminate and the Variety Intelligence Platform, seeks to answer this question and others that logically follow: How do streamers compare to broadcast and cable networks? Are TV shows being cancelled faster than ever? How are slates changing as we come to the end of the Peak TV era?
The report analyses TV content released by the eight largest US-based subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services – Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+ and Peacock – and the major broadcast and cable networks between January 2020 and August 2023. Luminate provided extensive data on the networks’ content output, including premiere dates, number of seasons, genres and renewal status, which was then contextualised by VIP+.
The results show that Netflix’s reputation as a show killer is largely undeserved, with the streamer falling right in the middle of the pack when looking at cancellation rates proportionally. Instead, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max surges ahead of the other SVODs, largely as a result of the company’s major streaming catalogue purge last year.
But the networks’ top-line numbers are only the beginning. In Hollywood’s new age of austerity, understanding the trends reshaping the content landscape is essential to understanding how the entertainment industry itself is being reformed.
