As long as it’s early enough in the new year to add resolutions to the list, here’s a new one: do not watch any new TV show until it’s actually ended, especially if it’s on Netflix.
It’s a lesson I should have learned with Santa Clarita Diet, the flesh-eating zombie comedy starring Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, which showed tremendous promise but was axed without its season-three cliffhanger ever getting resolved. And the excellent serial-killer-hunters drama Mindhunter, which was cancelled despite teasing an eventual showdown with the BTK killer.1
Netflix has only gotten worse about this kind of thing, with seven shows - most of which I’ve never heard of, admittedly - getting cancelled despite unresolved cliffhanger endings in 2022 alone.
This doesn’t just happen with Netflix - Flipped, a very funny orphaned Quibi series which wound up on the Roku Channel, was setting up for a second season which never happened - or even with TV shows. Don’t get me started on Call of Duty: Ghosts, which I actually liked but among most CoD fans has a reputation something like Highlander 2: The Quickening.
Netflix seems to be much worse about it than every other streaming service, though. And the hits keep on coming:
Netflix series 1899 has been canceled by the streamer after just one season, leaving the series on a huge cliffhanger that we're unlikely to see resolved…
"With a heavy heart we have to tell you that 1899 will not be renewed," co-showrunners Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, who were also behind the Netflix cult classic Dark, announced yesterday (January 2) on Odar’s Instagram(opens in new tab) account. "We would have loved to finish this incredible journey with a 2nd and 3rd season as we did with Dark. But sometimes things don’t turn out the way you planned. That's life. We know this will disappoint millions of fans out there. But we want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts that you were a part of this wonderful adventure."
The series was released on the streamer on November 17 and follows the fateful voyage of the Kerberos, an immigrant steamship heading from Europe to New York on the cusp of the 20th Century. The final episode of season 1 ended with a big twist, however – the passengers were in a simulation, and the year is actually 2099. The multi-language show featured an international ensemble cast including Emily Beecham, Aneurin Barnard, Andreas Pietschmann, Miguel Bernardeau, Isabella Wei, and Jonas Bloquet.
I didn’t really know much about 1899 - at first I assumed it was yet another Yellowstone spinoff - but it was apparently one of Netflix’s most-watched shows, and when the cancellation was announced, the reaction on Reddit was absolutely scathing. The general consensus seems to be that Netflix, for all of its resources, seems to have absolutely no idea what it’s doing except going out of its way to display contempt for its subscribers.
It makes sense for Netflix to spend a lot of money for so many shows, movies and documentaries. With most of the major Hollywood studios creating their own streaming services, they’ll want to keep all of their best content for themselves, leaving Netflix to come up with its own franchises.
They’ve had some success - Stranger Things, Squid Game, several hundred serial killer and tiger-owning meth addict documentaries - and if some of their new content falls through the cracks, I guess they’re hoping people will discover it eventually.
Fine, but who’s going to commit to watching a show which was cancelled without a proper ending? At least make each season completely self-contained, give us a movie that wraps everything up, or go completely insane and make the main character a psychotic mass murderer or something.
Among the major streamers, Netflix has first-mover advantage and remains the “default” streaming service in the minds of many. No one ever talks about “Paramount Plus and chill.” But it wasn’t that long ago that Blockbuster Video looked like an unstoppable juggernaut, too.
Netflix should know all about that. Blockbuster, its workplace comedy set at last Blockbuster video store, was axed after - you guessed it - one season.
To be fair, this might have been because executive producer David Fincher didn’t want to continue, more than Netflix shutting it down.