How Netflix’s Stance On Cancelation Changes The Way We Binge-Watch

Time to watch your Netflix show. You fire up your device, hear the famous “ta dumm,” find your show, only to find that there isn’t another season because it’s been canceled. You sigh because this isn’t the first time this has happened, and you somehow know it won’t be the last. 

Warrior Nun, the latest casualty of Netflix’s premature cancelation spree, sent fans into a rage after the show’s frontrunner, Simon Barry, tweeted that Netflix would not be renewing the show for a third season. Fans tweeted images of their cancelation confirmation emails, a change.org petition was created, and a few fans pooled together some cash and posted a billboard directly across from the main Netflix offices proclaiming, #SAVEWARRIORNUN. 

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Netflix has become synonymous with prematurely canceling series. While most shows are left to live on the platform forever in incompletion, only 2 shows have made it past the cancelation graveyard: One day at a Time and Tuca and Bertie, picked up by Pop and Adult Swim, respectively. Reasons for cancelation vary from lack of viewership, lack of budget, or what seems like no reason at all.

For a show to be successful on Netflix, users must binge-watch a series as soon as it comes out, or else it is in danger of being canceled. While this isn’t an official rule or requirement by any means, users find themselves binging a show immediately instead of being able to watch it at their own pace, for which streaming was initially intended. Squid Game holds the record with 2.3 billion hours viewed across 20 weeks. 

Squid Game

Image source: IMDb

As it stands, when a show is canceled, Netflix will leave the series on its platform for viewers to continue to watch, unlike another streaming platform, which not only cancels series but pulls them from their catalog. Thanks to its new Warner Bros. Discovery+ parentage, HBOMax has begun what can only be described as a mass culling, canceling, and removing of shows with no mercy. They even canceled shows and movies that had completed production but had yet to premiere, most famously the Batgirl movie.

Netflix continues to disrupt the world of streaming, whether by premature cancelation, the stoppage of password sharing, or the second cancellation of Blockbuster, the first being the business and the second being the show. Will Netflix listen to its subscribers and stop canceling all of our favorite shows? Only time will tell. 

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