I saw this at the Independent this morning: "Netflix has a Stranger Things problem." And that problem is that with the series finale coming in a few days, one of the major draws offered by Netflix is going away. As the author so adeptly says: "For fans, it’s a sad farewell. For Netflix, it must be like staring down the length of a sheer cliff face."
Significantly, Stranger Things is also one of the few Netflix series to have actually increased its audience on a season-by-season basis. Recently, this is something the streamer has struggled with: the first seasons of shows such as the Korean thriller Squid Game or the Addams family adaptation Wednesday rank among the most widely seen TV programmes of the decade, but both experienced so-called “second season syndrome”, in which they saw a marked decline – in audience figures and overall enthusiasm – when they returned for seconds. Some of Netflix’s other big recent hits have essentially been one-and-dones: the British miniseries Adolescence and Baby Reindeer were hugely popular, but both were short and self-contained stories.
But the article emphasizes one of the problems that Netflix and other streamers have when it comes to programming: "It’s been over nine years since the first series of Stranger Things came out [in 2016], and an interminable three-and-a-half-year wait since the end of its fourth[.]" Nine years to produce 5 seasons with a 3-1/2 year gap between the 4th and 5th seasons. People are willing to wait a year from the start of one season to the next, but beyond that interest dies off. People forget about it. The actors age out of the roles. I'm not sure how Stranger Things bucked that trend, but it should be viewed as a anomaly: something audiences enjoyed enough that they were willing to wait long periods between seasons.
Other ways that Netflix fails have been from messing with what made the show or IP popular in the first place. Wednesday was supposed to be the titular character's adventures while away at a boarding school, but the second season brought the whole family along (besides the long gap between seasons). It was no longer Wednesday but The Adams Family rebooted. Cowboy BeBop could have been a hit--it was based on a popular Japanese animated scifi/western series and all they had to do was translate it to live action. But they instead decided to mess with the secret sauce in the name of diversity and just because they could, and ended up with a show that die hard fans hated. And with that kind of word-of-mouth advertising, it was doomed to failure.
Lockwood & Co. was a supernatural thriller based on a popular teen series, that was popular on Netflix. But as Leila Latif of The Guardian wrote: "Lockwood and Co is a delight, with a level of intelligence and respect for its source material, its characters and its audience." Thus, it was cancelled.
Wednesday, earlier this year, and Stranger Things, now, were the primary reason my family was hanging on to Netflix. But with Stranger Things ending and the second season of Wednesday being so disappointing, we plan on cancelling Netflix shortly.
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