When a streaming show is canceled after just one or maybe two seasons, audience frustration radiates out from social media. TV used to be a business that wanted long-running hits, but it doesn’t feel that way anymore and there’s no shortage of catastrophizing. “Television is dead,” is how one person put it. “The current model is unsustainable. It’s profit over art.”
The disappointment is real — but this is also a romanization of the past. TV has always been profit over art. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help us understand what’s happening now.
But I get why it’s easy to fantasize that things were better before streaming upended everything. Survivorship bias means we remember all those old network shows that ran for multiple seasons and then lived on in reruns, but not the countless others — and truly, the numbers are staggering — that were canceled only a few episodes in, becoming yet more pop cultural detritus consigned to the Hollywood junk heap.
But it’s never been this bad — right? I don’t know if that’s accurate either! Around 600 scripted shows premiered in 2022. But go back 20 years, to 2002, and that number was 182. More shows are getting made, therefore more shows are getting canceled.
With the traditional broadcast model, a long-running hit with 22 episodes a season meant big profits, especially in syndication. That financial incentive also did the work of shaping audience expectations for the regularity that came with long-running shows.
None of this applies to streaming originals. That’s because money isn’t pouring in — at least, not money pegged to individual shows. The business model is different, which means the goals are different. Here’s how entertainment journalist Rick Ellis explains the thought process in his Too Much TV newsletter: “While many people in Hollywood don’t want to believe it, three new originals with eight-episode seasons are better for subscriber numbers than one show with 24 episodes. Especially because three different shows provides more of a chance you’ll have one that breaks out with audiences.”
Perhaps! But this has left audiences feeling forsaken. And people who make their living in television are experiencing one of the most intense periods of professional destabilization in recent memory.
Who wants a diet of short-run shows only? Maybe it wouldn’t feel so dire if a nice chunk of streaming shows — 10 or 15 of them across different platforms — were getting multiple seasons.
The history of television is littered with shows that barely made it to double-digit episodes, but there were always exceptions — shows that struggled in the early going but were given a chance to find an audience. That’s not because executives were more nurturing than they are now; if a show with mediocre ratings stayed on the schedule, it was probably because there was nothing else to fill the slot.
The 1979-80 TV season was notorious for the number of shows that failed, including “Salvage 1” starring Andy Griffith as a guy who recovered abandoned space junk and used it to build his own rocket. Fourteen episodes aired in the first season. When the second season rolled around, the network aired just two episodes before pulling it off schedule for good. Imagine how frustrated audiences must have been! But that wasn’t uncommon; four or eight episodes might air and then — poof — suddenly a show was gone because it was a ratings disaster. At least with streaming, you’re getting a completed season (even if it’s short) before it’s canceled.
Here’s another frustration you hear right now: Hollywood has never been more obsessed with IP, aka intellectual property. I agree that this endless lineup of prequels and reboots and adaptations is tiresome. No one wants to take a risk on original ideas. But let’s not fall into the trap of revisionist history, either. Going back decades, spinoffs have always been part of the TV landscape, which is really just another way of saying … IP
IMDb has a page listing “Short Lived TV Shows 1970’s/80’s” and it’s a fascinating time capsule. Never heard of most of these shows. But what’s really surprising is just how many were based on movies (cough, IP once again).
Scroll down the list and … there was a TV series based on “Casablanca”?? (Lasted all of five episodes; maybe Sam got tired of playing that piano every week.) There was another based on “The King and I.” Also: “Breaking Away,” “Animal House,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “The Four Seasons,” “Logan’s Run” and more — all hoping to be the next “M*A*S*H,” I’m guessing.
I’m not in the prediction business and I can’t say whether the TV industry can recover if it continues to abandon the kind of long-running shows that become part of the fabric of our pop cultural lives. But it’s also a mistake to think through the current challenges if we’re only taking into account what’s transpired over the last 10 years or so.
Viewer discontent is real. Media bosses might want to start taking that seriously again.
Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.
