[o_class_star]

Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.

I buy it, but that sucks. I know my view is idiosyncratic, but I view making money like a biological process. Most things have to do it if they want to survive, but it doesn't deserve to be the thing that matters. The Silicon Valley focus on explosive growth, as opposed to healthy and reasonable long-term growth, is bad for the world.

I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.

Right. This is especially true of series with defined story arcs. A sitcom can be ended at any time, but if Breaking Bad had ended at Season 4, it would have pissed off everyone.

[jon-wood]

I'm hoping that this policy leads to much tighter story arcs which aren't designed to take 5 seasons to come to a conclusion. There's far too much TV that basically only has actual new plot elements in the first and last ten minutes, and then pads everything out to a full episode.

A world in which writers know they have, at best, 24 episodes to tell their story will hopefully result in much more focused story telling, and fewer filler episodes looking into the exciting history of what minor character C did 15 years ago.

[skohan]

The problem is that it's not possible to know in advance if a series will be one of the blessed few to last more than two seasons. Designing a 24-episode arc, and then having the show be a smash hit is also a problem for Netflix

[jon-wood]

I’ve never encountered a well written TV series where I was disappointed at it ending after two seasons, while I’ve encountered a great many which outstayed their welcome and soured me on the entire thing. I know some people love great long things that never seem to end, I just don’t count myself among them.