Netflix has no chill

The Jeff Goldblum-starrer tv series Kaos launched its debut season two months ago on Netflix. The slick dark comedy based on Greek mythology evidently gained fans the way a cult classic would, because they are all up in arms following news of cancellation of Kaos season two. Already.

As online indignation goes, fans are taking up this unjust cause, going as far as filing petitions to bring the show back for another season and threatening to cancel their Netflix subscriptions.

But for one of the major paid streaming services around the world, Netflix is not being personal. Its just doing business. Dropping the axe on seemingly popular shows and disappointing fans habitually is just a business decision. In the current case of axing Kaos, its fans were not in a big enough number for the streaming platform to find profitable. No matter the quality of production, the stellar cast, the fresh script. It just did not have enough viewership as compared to even a boring drama (which we would call ‘time pass’ colloquially) like The Perfect Couple which dropped around the same time as Kaos.

Contrary to the speed you expect from digital technology, online streaming platforms do not have ratings at their fingertips as traditional TV or cinema. TV ratings are available a day after a show is aired, box office numbers are based on the first week of a film’s release. The number of viewers is gathered pretty quickly and whether a movie or show was a hit or flop is pretty decisive.

Netflix burgeoned on audiences’ appetite for binge-watching. We can watch episodes back to back and finish a series over a weekend or in one day. If we are doing something better with our lives and not bingeing, maybe we will stagger the episodes and take a month to watch the complete show. So viewership figures cannot be based on the initial week or days of the launch of a new show.

This week when the numbers for Kaos rolled in, they were stark enough for Netflix to decide to not stick with the show despite its seeming popularity online. In the first week of its release, a total of 825 million minutes of the show were watched. In just the second week, that figure dipped by 52 per cent. In comparison The Perfect Couple, starring Nicole Kidman's cosmetic surgery, drew way more eyeballs in its first week. While 1.91 billion minutes of the show were watched initially, the figure only rose the next week to 1.97 billion minutes.

This is a small lesson to not believe everything that the internet tells you. The Perfect Couple didn't generate buzz online; everyone was talking about Kaos excitedly. But more people stuck through watching Greer Garrison's (Kidman) perfect family life unravel than Zeus (Goldblum) manipulate other gods and the three Fates in order to defend his reign over Olympus.

A bigger loss for fans of twisted and dark crime dramas, like myself, was the 2017 show Mindhunter. The show followed two fictional FBI agents who pioneered the development or criminal profiling by interviewing imprisoned serial killer in 1970s America. Despite being one of the most acclaimed Netflix series, it was cancelled after two successful seasons. Not successful enough when considering the sum of money it demanded. Mindhunter's period setting required expensive production design and VFX. In the end, the psychological thriller just did not create a large enough audience to justify its cost.

There is no big entertainment without big money. There would be no Titanic without 200 million dollars. But there would be James Cameron, possibly trying to get another Terminator installment a lease of life. Would Cameron have justified making Titanic as a small budget film and still satisfied his artistic vision? Probably not. In a similar vein, the creator and cast behind shows like Kaos and Mindhunter, cannot begrudge cancellation as much as the viewers. They know their projects are just not feasible if they haven't churned out a sufficient viewership. Neither Fincher nor Corvell will get emotional and threaten not to make more shows for streaming platforms because one good one got axed.

Shows have been culled from other streaming services too. Disney+ pulled the plug on The Acolyte,a spin-off of Star Wars after one season; Amazon Prime halted historical romance My Lady Jane. Tokyo Vice was cancelled by Max and Halo was pulled out by Paramount Plus. This indicates an industry trend and there are factors creating it.

When the Covid pandemic holed us all up in our homes, we turned to streaming services for more variety of entertainment. In 2022, streaming platforms hit a plateau of subscribers numbers and had to switch strategy in investments. Where there was an increasing trend of streaming services investing in TV and films while subscribers were growing, now the question was how to get more subscribers. Although Netflix and other streaming services keep their finances and programming decisions under wraps, it seems obvious that the new concern for the industry is profitability, as is evident by the culling of fan favourite shows.

Is the cost of renewing a series for more seasons worth it when it did not reach a wide viewership?

‘Pass time’ shows manage to stick in viewers’ imagination enough to want more to consume. Shows that have the potential to become franchises can justify the cost of renewal. Unfortunately, a show like Bridgerton has mass appeal although it may not be as clever as Kaos. The fans who are waving their fists at Netflix for cancelling the second season of the latter show, will barely take away a handful of subscribers for the streaming service if they cancel their memberships. Netflix has hooked a vast subscriber base of some 270 million worldwide and added eight million more in the last quarter alone. If hundreds are railing against it for axing Kaos, millions will tune in for the next Bridgerton season.