It’s hard to get a precise count on shows that Netflix has canceled over the last year—some obvious, like Dead Boy Detectives, Ratched, and Barbarians. Others kinda quietly become miniseries, as happens with a lot of the streamer’s K-dramas like Crash Landing on You. Others just kinda disappear, and we find out that they were canceled well after the fact. Numbers aside, though, there’s no question that Netflix has fed into a perception that you’d do well not to get too attached to any of its shows, even those with the highest profiles.
Streaming services have complicated and shadowy motivations when it comes to the shows they renew or cancel. Where a broadcast network might be looking almost exclusively at how viewership translates into advertiser revenue, a streamer is worried about how a show’s popularity translates into subscriptions. If a show isn’t drawing new subscribers, or isn’t generating the kind
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