Cancel Culture: A Slew of One-Season Streamer Cancellations Ushers in a New Normal

The explosion of content from Netflix, Disney+ and other streamers has resulted in more TV shows than any human can possibly watch. And while the glut of content created something for everyone, the era of peak TV is over, with contraction in Hollywood bringing several shows to an end — many after just one season.

Single-season streaming cancellations in 2024 have included the surprise axing of Disney’s “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte” — a show whose premiere performed well according to Disney+’s own metrics — and Netflix series such as “The Brothers Sun,” “Obliterated” and “Dead Boy Detectives,” which once reigned in the streamer’s Top 10 lists and top 100 most-watched TV titles for the first half of 2024. 

At least 19 streaming shows were canceled in 2024 after one season, after at least 25 were canceled in 2023.

The streamers have “started to see that this shotgun approach of doing dozens, if not hundreds, of shows is unsustainable,” former NBC Studios president Tom Nunan told TheWrap. “We’re still seeing this clearing out of content that was once ordered rather a bit more casually than it was even two years ago before the strikes.”  

The outcry from fans has been intense for some canceled titles whose viewership figures have never been made publicly available, like Prime Video’s “My Lady Jane.” Fans of the historical fantasy romance have launched an online petition attempting to save the show.

The cancellations underscore how shifting priorities in the streaming era have changed the game and made it tougher for newer shows to stand out. Viewership is still a significant factor in whether a show gets renewed, but streamers are more focused on bringing in new subscribers and mitigating the churn that has plagued the nascent industry.

A project’s cost, creative vision, acclaim with fans and critics and any awards recognition are other key factors in both linear and streaming cancellations. In some instances, a show ending shortly into the start of its run can also be related to its creator, such as Pete Davidson’s decision to not continue Peacock’s “Bupkis” despite it scoring a season 2 renewal.

Industry-wide trends in streaming, such as a strategy shift towards expensive sports rights or live programming, content discovery challenges or belt-tightening for the sake of profitability are also raising the bar for shows to get renewed beyond the first season, experts told TheWrap.  

“It is so much easier for a show to get lost in the tsunami of content right now than it ever was during the heyday of cable — even with 500 channels,” former IFC and Sundance channel executive Evan Shapiro said. “A much smaller share of shows are getting discovered in their first season.”

Netflix’s rapid ascension also put pressure on legacy media, likely contributing to the cancellations as those competitors found themselves overspending to keep up, said Andy Goldman, an adjunct professor at NYU and former vice president of program strategy and planning at HBO.

But even Netflix, Apple and Amazon don’t have unlimited resources and have more flexibility to pull the plug on shows as long as it doesn’t negatively impact the total number of subscriptions.  

“If a monster streamer like Netflix chooses to cancel something that someone feels is a beloved show to them, but it’s an extremely niche audience and it’s not going to move the needle at all for subscriptions, they have that luxury because they’re so dominant right now,” Nunan said. “The weaker streamers don’t have a choice and can’t afford to have poor performers on their P&L sheet.” 

And a potential silver lining for shows canceled after one season is that in the streaming era they can sometimes find another life through content licensing.

“The dirty little secret about streaming is [that] still the most robust numbers are coming in for their library, not for their new shows,” Nunan said. “So the new shows can come and go.”

Representatives for Netflix, Max, Prime Video and Paramount+ declined to comment for this story. Disney+/Hulu and Apple TV+ did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment. 

Linear TV vs. streaming cancellations

The traditional linear TV format made canceling a show difficult, even if it was doing poorly in the ratings. Every network operates by a schedule of specific time periods and a group of “anchor shows” that typically run in the primetime slot. Those shows would give birth to new shows which would air behind them and could later be moved to a different time slot.

Before a show could be cancelled, networks would need a replacement that’s going to not only outperform the show they’re removing from a specific time slot, but actually finished and ready to take its place.

“You can’t just launch a show with a new episode and then wait three weeks for the next episode to come along,” Nunan said. “You’re moving these things and they don’t move like speed boats. They move like giant aircraft carriers.”

In the heyday of linear, the major networks competed, but it was less fierce compared to what has taken form since streaming and the peak TV era began. Linear TV executives could take chances on shows like “Cheers” and “Seinfeld” which took time to find their footing with audiences. 

“If they were promising creatively, they could more than pay their bills for the time periods that they were in and that was the same thing with subscription cable,” Nunan explained. “There was no subscriber that was relying exclusively on one show to have that subscription renewed.”

Once streaming began to flourish, there were less time-related restrictions and an opportunity for more creative freedom.

“For a while, anyone with even minor successes were offered a ‘blank check’ in terms of budget and creative freedom,” Goldman said. “This led to a glut of boutique programming that could not be properly marketed to its intended audiences and could not justify the exorbitant costs.” 

In the beginning, streaming networks typically green-lit shows for at least two seasons, often for three or four, Nunan said.

“Part of that was because they were trying to create positive artist relations and say, ‘Look, we’re not going to give up on you right away,” he continued. “We’re not going to treat you the way some of the networks have treated you because we’re ordering fewer episodes. We’re going to order more seasons of your show.”  

But as the number of series and streaming services increased, so too did Wall Street’s scrutiny of its impact on media companies’ bottom lines. “Suddenly, streamers could not be nearly as generous or gracious or patient as they once were,” he added. 

Shapiro knocked streaming’s content-discovery capabilities as being a “total mess,” citing it as one of the many outside factors playing a role in one-season cancellations. He also pointed to a shift in streamers’ strategies at “break-neck speed,” with money increasingly moving from entertainment into sports. 

Streaming success is difficult to measure

While viewership and cost are the two most important factors in cancellation decisions, those metrics remain mostly behind closed doors. Industry leader Netflix offers the most transparency into the performance of its titles. But even that data only scratches the surface as it does not reveal whether viewers completed those titles’ seasons or engaged past the first episode. 

For example, when looking at the viewership of the first half of year’s canceled shows in the latest edition of Netflix’s biannual engagement report “The Brothers Sun” ranked as the 28th most-watched TV title on the streamer in the first half of 2024, with 23.9 million views and 175.6 million total viewing hours. Meanwhile, “Obliterated” ranked 89th with 13.3 million views and 90.7 million viewing hours and “Dead Boy Detective” ranked 99th with 12.6 million total views and 91.3 million viewing hours for the same period. 

A Netflix view is defined as total time spent divided by a program’s running time.

Nielsen, which is viewed as the industry standard of ratings measurement and covers 45 million households, has also faced criticism about its streaming viewership data being limited. The firm can currently track what content is being streamed for how long and on what devices and is in the process of rolling out new capabilities to expand audience and out-of-home viewing measurement.

Out of the shows canceled after one season in 2024, the titles that landed in Nielsen’s Top 10 lists during their run included Netflix’s “Ratched,” “Obliterated,” “Uncoupled,” “The Brothers Sun,” “Dead Boy Detectives” and “Kaos,” as well as Disney+’s “The Acolyte.”

While disclosures around ratings are few and far between in the streaming age, audience demand data for recently canceled titles is more readily available. 

“The Acolyte,” which reported 11.1 million views within its first five days of streaming on Disney+ to become the streamer’s most-watched series premiere in 2024, was the second most in-demand new release of the year, according to Parrot Analytics. When compared to the average show, it was 55.8 times more in-demand. 

By comparison, Hulu’s “Death and Other Details” ranked as the 42nd most in-demand title and the second highest out of the shows that were canceled in 2024. When compared to the average show, it was 21.4 times more in-demand. Hulu did not publicly disclose viewership figures. 

Content licensing offers a path forward

Despite getting canceled after one season, fallen shows have a glimmer of hope in being rediscovered through content licensing.

A “huge reservoir” of shows created in the peak TV era aren’t brand new and proprietary to a single platform, Hub Entertainment research founder Jonathan Giegengack told TheWrap. Shows like “Yellowstone,” and HBO’s “Ballers” and “Band of Brothers” have been licensed successfully to other platforms.

“If they know that something performed really well on HBO or on Disney+, it’s probably less of a leap to expect that it would perform well on Netflix,” Giegengack said.

A recent survey of 1,600 U.S. TV viewers ages 16 to 74 by Hub found that 60% of respondents agreed they are seeing more shows available in places other than where they originally aired. Only 40% of respondents said their new favorite show was brand new. 

Giegengack predicts that streamers will continue to focus on projects that offer the least amount of risk, whether that’s leveraging popular IP from mediums like video games, podcasts or short-form video, or bringing back TV genres with proven success on linear TV, such as medical or legal dramas, but with shorter episode counts within seasons. He also sees an indie model where creators are self-financing their shows becoming a trend to mitigate the amount of cancellations.

“Not everybody has the money to self finance their own TV show, but I do think that’s a way that we could see more of the shows that break the mold,” he said.

Though viewers may complain about their favorite shows getting canceled prematurely, Nunan said the studios deserve credit for trying to take bigger risks in episodic TV in recent years. 

“They can’t please everybody all the time,” he said. “With all the risks they take, it’s kosher to say, ‘Enough’s enough. We can’t do this one any longer. We want to keep our powder dry for another big swing.’”

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