Netflix are notorious for cancelling shows out of the blue, even when there are swathes of fans either currently enjoying its episodes or impatiently awaiting the next season to arrive. However, the CEOs at the streaming service have made the odd claim that they have “never cancelled a successful show”, raising questions as to what they consider “successful”.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters make several strange claims, but the one that stands out comes from Sarandos. He said, “We have never cancelled a successful show. A lot of these shows were well-intended but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget. The key to it is you have to be able to talk to a small audience on a small budget and a large audience at a large budget. If you do that well, you can do that forever.”
This has enraged several Netflix subscribers who are aware of the vast profits that a big company like Netflix makes, and yet they are only measuring the success of a TV show on a metric of hours watched and whether or not audiences watch an entire season, rather than assessing whether or not people are merely enjoying the show.
Sarandos then made two other strange (and rather egotistical) claims. The first is, “We are equal parts HBO, AMC, FX, the Food Network, HGTV and Comedy Central. Lifetime. You used to have to hunt through 500 channels of cable to find them all, and now they’re gonna be on Netflix. There’s no difference in prestige quality television in each genre as long as they’re well executed.”
Then Sarandos claimed that Netflix were happy to keep going without necessarily creating new intellectual properties. “Can you build a big business without [it] and without a library?” he said. “We just did.”
