Emma Fraser is really unhappy that Netflix has canceled 1899 after only a single season:
Nothing says ushering in the new year like attempting to break old habits. Netflix obviously didn’t get the resolutions memo, not even waiting until everyone had gone back to work before swiftly canning yet another ambitious series after one season. Yep, 1899 walks the same cancellation plank as shows like Archive 81 and The Midnight Club, with the news this week that, despite its popularity, Netflix is ending the series.
....So, why is this a big deal? Shows have long been dumped unceremoniously throughout the history of network TV....It is a business, after all, and only a handful of episodes have likely been shot in those cases; viewer investment isn’t as entrenched.
Flashforward (unintentional TV reference ahoy!) to the binge model and getting shit-canned after an entire season—complete with a tantalizing cliffhanger—is now the norm. Getting invested in a new series at all starts to feel rather pointless. It’s no wonder that, following the cancellation of 1899, people on Twitter are venting about how they’re so tired of getting hooked on a new Netflix series only for it to end after a season. The sentiment online is fueled by annoyance that this has happened yet again.
Two things. First, I'll bet that 1899's fans aren't so unhappy that they'll give up on Netflix—and that's probably all Netflix cares about.
Second, there's no telling why this happened. It might have been purely financial, but it also might have been a fight over creative control or something like that. Netflix might not be entirely to blame.
OK, three things. My advice is for Netflix to follow the Firefly model. It had a genuine following but wasn't profitable enough to keep going as a TV series. But it also had a bunch of unresolved story lines, so Joss Whedon shopped around the idea of a theatrical film to tie things up. Universal bit and the film was made. The same thing could be done with 1899.
Now, it's true that Whedon's movie didn't do well. But why not try again with 1899, except as a Netflix film? The great thing is that at the end of 1899, we discover that all the weird stuff happening is because the characters are living in a virtual reality created by a space ship in the year 2099. So instead of a weird, hard-to-describe puzzle box set on an ocean liner a hundred years ago, the sequel would be a nice, genre-friendly science fiction film that has a good chance of attracting a wider audience.
Why not?
I cancelled my Netflix subscription years ago precisely because of this.
One person’s response isn’t a data trend, it’s an anecdote.
At $9.99-19.99 per month, it’ll take a lot more subscribers cancelling to make cancelling a multimillion-dollar TV production a costly mistake for Netflix. Assuming the show “only” cost $10m to make, 42k-83k subscribers would need to cancel before Netflix would see a net loss in profits from cancelling the show.
Thanks, reply guy
Because you knew years in advance they were going to cancel “1899?”
I've thought about canceling my Netflix subscription several times but I always find something new to watch and I remain a subscriber,
Lately, I've been watching lots of foreign programs, mostly from South Korea and Australia. I would be hard to find that stuff anywhere else.
Watched all 8½ hours of 1899. Like a lot (most) of what Netflix churns out now and for the past few years, it was visually interesting, but the writing was bad. Far from the worst crap on Netflix, but so bad in itself that it all came down to promising to explain itself in a future season. The movie proposed here would at least provide the (crappy) solution required for the series, but on this one it's hard to disagree with Netflix' decision to just cancel it. (Also, those movie wrappings on series are usually worse than the series themselves so really, why bother.)
This is a great point with which I thoroughly agree.
There's something about the dynamics at Netflix that selects for quality visuals and terrible writing. I've seen this so often.
There's an interesting story there, but I don't know what it is.
(In a way this reinforces my very-unPC point that "style" is vastly overweighted in the arts. Literary people mock people like myself, who care about plot more than the rest of a work, as "plotcels" who can't appreciate style in words or in imagery.
But it turns out that style is easy to copy! Whether as ChatGPT, or in AI art, or as NFLX mass-produced dreck.
What's HARD to produce is plot [at least the sort of tight, original, plots appreciated by plotcels].)
I don't care for the Netflix model of dumping an entire season at a time. I prefer the HBO/old-timey teevie model where you get an episode each week, until the season is done. It encourages thinking, talking, and even re-watching the episode, thus getting more mental nourishment out of each episode than binging down the entire season at a gulp.
Would Game of Thrones have been the worldwide phenomenon/every Monday discussion at the coffee pot thing that it was, each season stretching over months, had the seasons been dumped, like a load of old garbage, on a single day? The extended release schedule permits interest to build, additional viewers to come in, and even more media coverage.
Netflix might want to try this for selected "properties" and see what the effects are.
Different strokes for different folks. On HBO I usually just wait for the season to finish before watching so I can binge on it. For some I wait for the entire series to finish.
Only problem with this is if you wait for a series to end it will probably never hit the metrics needed for it to actually get completed based on how things are right now with Netflix. 1899 was one of Netflix's higher rated shows and when it was created was meant to be a 3 year show to finish the story.
A handful of shows, particularly Asian, follow a weekly release schedule on Netflix.
Like watching paint dry on molasses in February. Not even Emily Beecham could hold me. Another one with a basic premise more than half a century old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Characters_in_Search_of_an_Exit
A Very Special Afterschool Presentation that might assuage your pain.
https://youtu.be/Oa1x9GwIK6c
Every single show made in the past 12 years is a soap opera. Oh I'm sorry, a serial drama! Personally I am just sick and tired of serial drama where any damn thing can happen at any time, every episode must end with a cliff hanger or a twist (especially season finales), good characters turn bad, bad characters turn good, there is never any type of narrative satisfaction because the ultimate compliment to a show is to be "binge worthy". These shows are the media equivalent of Cheetos, which are also binge worthy because they never leave you satisfied.
Would it really be so impossible for Netflix or one of the other streaming services to actually create a good old fashioned episodic show, where each episode is a largely self-contained story where oh, I don't know, mostly good but flawed people try to solve some kind of problem and most of the time they do? Is that so much to ask?
But no, instead all we get are thousands of mystery box Lost clones.
Side note. I never watched 1899 but the premise sounds very similar to Ascension (though that was a space ship traveling in deep space that never actually left Earth), which was also cancelled after one season.
I've been watching a lot of South Korean dramas on Netflix. I do it to learn Korean but in addition to that, they are really well-made and entertaining.
Usually, Korean dramas wrap up the story in one season. A very popular drama might get a second season (with a new storyline) but that's the exception. In the US, shows are milked for every last dollar until they finally jump the shark.
Yeah that's the caveat I'd put on my rant. A serial drama that actually wraps after one season I can get behind. In the old days we called that a "mini-series." But nearly every US show likes to end a season with one more crazy twist!
The one exception to that was Russian Doll, or so I thought. I thought the first season of that show was nearly perfect. And by making a second season IMO they rendered the first season into a joke. Not that I will ever watch season 2.
But you should watch season 2, it's terrific!
Very entertaining but you have to focus and that takes time away from doing two things at the same time.
Hello, Me!
Tomorrow
My Holo Love
Hotel Del Luna
Mystic Pop-up Bar
A Korean Odyssey
Black (no longer available on Netflix)
Rugal
Abyss
We just finished Kingdom.. It's a supernatural period piece -- sword fights and zombies! Just started Alchemy of Souls.
We also enjoyed Move To Heaven and Business Proposal.
Also It's Okay to Not Be Okay, and Another Ms Oh.
There are many more shows available to stream at Rakuten Viki. If you like Alchemy you'll probably like Strong Woman Do Bong Soon and Guardian: the Great and Lonely God as well.
My wife and I have been watching K-dramas for 5 years for exactly that reason. Tell a story in 12 or 16 episodes and move on. No more shark milking! Actual resolution!
I think you'd like the Kominsky Method with Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin.
It lasts three seasons but the episodes are very self-contained though the whole has an over-arching story line that wraps up beautifully.
Guess I don’t get around enough. This is the first time I’d heard of “1899” …
I just enjoy shows for what they are. Not everything has to be wrapped up in a neat bow, I can appreciate it and think through the possibilities of what might happen, if I care enough.
Actually, Netflix already set precedence with Sense8.
Following a surprise cancellation, there was a big uproar. Netflix ended up adding a 2 hour finale episode to clear up loose ends. You can read about it here: https://bityl.co/GWJI
It should be standard practice that every show's contract shall require cancellations to allow for one final episode to clean up loose threads in the story.
I had never heard of 1899, and it sounds interesting, but now that Kevin has spoiled the ending, I can't imagine wanting to watch it now. At least add a SPOILER warning, Kev, for those of us that might have wanted to check it out.
If you want to watch a show that has endless episodes on Netflix, I suggest Resurrection: Ertegrul https://www.netflix.com/title/80127001
Four seasons--about 460 episodes in all. My partner and I spent almost 2 years following this story of medieval struggles pre-Ottoman empire between Knights Templar, the Turks, nomadic Turkish tribes, and the Mongols. Lots of decapitations, romance (very modestly depicted), battles, and folk practices.
Wait--that's really where that show ended up? That sounds like a parody of a bad TV show. It also sounds like a ripoff of the American Life On Mars, which was widely considered a disastrous attempt to wrap up a canceled show. I was mildly intrigued by the first ep of 1899, but I'm glad I wasn't intrigued enough to continue.
1899, 1883, 1923 . . .
Who can keep track?
" First, I'll bet that 1899's fans aren't so unhappy that they'll give up on Netflix—and that's probably all Netflix cares about."
That may well be what "Netflix" cares about. Is it what Reed Hastings cares about (and does he have the power to change it?)
Suppose we call the original DVD-based Netflix 1.0 That pivoted to Streaming Content Netflix 2.0, which pivoted to Original content Netflix 3.0. In all three cases, Hastings was smart enough to see where the puck was headed and craft a response.
Where's the puck headed today?
We are no longer in the Netflix 1.0 world of scarce content; everyone is drowning in content. Even if you pay nothing, you have unlimited content from YouTube, Tubi, Pluto, Plex, etc.
So what IS scarce and hence worth paying for? I would argue it's "editorializing", ie figuring out what .1% of this ocean of content is what I would most like to watch...
There was a time when Netflix though this was important, with their recommendation algorithm contest stuff, but somewhere along the way the usual B- MBA crowd took over and "optimized" this for "engagement" rather than for delight, for actual recommendation.
If Hastings has any sense, he's realize that
(a) this is killing his company. Superficially optimizing for engagement looks good, but it's creating a company with zero moats (companies that are not loved are companies that are easily replaced...)
(b) there is a real opportunity here, given where AI is headed, for a new type of company, one where what I am paying for is not the content, it is recommendations. And the company lives or dies by the quality of those recommendations. But these are not BS mass-manufactured recommendations, they are bespoke. The AI knows everything I've watched and knows what I liked and did not like. I can tell it (it doesn't have to figure it out by clumsy means like correlations) that I disliked this movie because of X and liked that because of Y. Even more, it can "watch" movies for me. It can tell me "look, I know you will hate the first ten minutes of this because it stupid predictable time wasting that a competent direct would have condensed to 30 second; but after ten minutes it pays off"; or I know everyone is talking about that movie, but, you will hate it because it's not REALLY about history, it's completely anachronistic; modern attitudes transplanted to 13th C France".
Obviously this business model has been tried before (this was essentially the point of magazines like London Review of Books or The New Yorker). It can work (as long as the parasites don't take over and start to assume that their job is the manufacture of mass amounts of contents rather than limited amounts of recommendation...)
But we have never before had the situation where this can be done so well and so personalized.
Skate to where the puck is headed, Mr Hastings...
I get why Sense8 couldn't be sustained: it had to fly cast and crew all around the world (London. Amsterdam, Iceland, Nairobi, Berlin, Seoul, India, Chicago, San Francisco, Mexico City) to produce its episode. But 1899 was pretty claustophobic, and there didn't even seem to be a lot of CGI, and what there was looked pretty low budget.
Thanks for the spoiler! Could've added a warning 🙂
Netflix is totally opaque about their reasons for this sort of thing, and that is what pisses people off.
But a likely hint will appear if you watch the "making of" episode. It is pretty clear that this series was stupid expensive to make.