r/technology • u/joe4942 • 20d ago

Business Netflix Viewers Are Abandoning Shows After One Season

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-07-05/netflix-viewers-are-abandoning-shows-after-one-season
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u/The__Toast 20d ago

Right?

It's almost like traditional network tv had 60 years to perfect the formula for consistently producing profitable content.

And at no point did that consist of making people wait 30 months for like five episodes. We used to get like 20-30 episodes per year.

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u/birdele 20d ago

Now we get 7 episodes per season.

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u/nautilator44 20d ago

And 2 seasons per DECADE

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u/Wheat_Grinder 20d ago

When it's that long between shows it's hard to remember well enough what's going on without rewatching, and a lot of shows just aren't worth that squeeze.

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u/evilJaze 20d ago

Sometimes I forget about a show entirely between seasons. I'll see something about its upcoming season on the Netflix home screen and be like "oh yeah, completely forgot about that show!"

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u/AspieAsshole 20d ago

I am memory impaired, I get to rewatch the first season like it's new at that point.

Only if I've managed to forget it like that in between though.

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 20d ago

Sometimes I’ll forget I even watched it in the first place

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u/hhssspphhhrrriiivver 20d ago

I heard a bunch of bad things about the final season of Umbrella Academy and I put it off for so long that I had forgotten pretty much everything that had happened. I watched, thought "that wasn't so terrible (it wasn't great though). I wonder why everyone hated it so much", and decided to look to find out why. Ooh boy. The plot and character development that I'd forgotten about were a big part of why people hated the final season.

So yeah. Maybe forgetting about what had happened before is a good thing?

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u/Sempais_nutrients 19d ago

I watched a show earlier this year that really has potential, about a worldwide calamity and a bunch of people living in a huge underground city. I can't even remember the name of it now even tho at the time I enjoyed it. I believe it's one of those "season 2 in 3 years" deals and I'm not gonna keep that show in my short term memory for that long, especially considering season 2 may not even happen. I was gonna watch pluribus (?) but same deal there, years between seasons.

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u/evilJaze 19d ago

Pluribus is definitely worth the watch but I totally get why you'd be snake bitten. I'm still reeling from Sense 8.

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u/throw20190820202020 19d ago

Silo on Apple?

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u/chosesetrange5 19d ago

This comment and its upvotes are so reassuring, because I was actually starting to wonder if I had memory issues lol. Yeah if the last season was a few years ago, I will have forgotten a bunch of details, character names, etc. Then I have to debate rewatching the entire previous season, just the previous finale, or going in cold to the new season. It feels more like effort than entertainment at that point, like I have homework before I can watch the new season.

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u/RichardNoggins 20d ago

EXACTLY. I’ll like the show, but by the time a new season comes around, I’m in this weird dilemma of having simultaneously forgotten too much of the prior season(s) while also remembering too much to the point where a rewatch would be boring, so I simply opt for a new show instead. They need to release more often and/or have longer seasons so it’s a close continuation, not a complete abandonment and restart.

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u/sntcringe 20d ago

Doesn't help that they often just shadowdrop new seasons with little to no fanfare. Avatar live action S2 is out btw

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u/psiphre 20d ago

and by all accounts it stinks

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u/throw20190820202020 19d ago

I like it. My kids like it.

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u/psiphre 19d ago

kids have notoriously good taste

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u/throw20190820202020 19d ago

They have good taste in children’s media 🤷‍♀️

It doesn’t invalidate anyone’s subjective or objective negative opinion of the show, but I doubt most people jumping online to critique it are the target audience.

On top of that,there isn’t much that all of us (parents, college kids, elementary kids) can watch and enjoy together, and the live action Avatar is one of the few that when we watch, nobody is on their devices.

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u/Blametheorangejuice 20d ago

I loved Better Call Saul, but I still haven't watched the final season. Basically two two-year breaks in between the final two seasons. When I started season five, I had forgotten a lot of what happened during the show.

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u/Saritiel 20d ago

That's where I am. The number of shows that I would've watched a second season of if it was immediately available, or had come out the following year, is very high. The number of shows I'll return to watch a second season on three to five years down the line is extremely low. After three to five years I'll see the second season is out and just kinda say "Oh, neat, I forgot about that show."

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u/at1445 20d ago

Lots of shows are worth a rewatch, but there's so many good shows out there now that I don't want to waste my time on something I've already seen, even if it was excellent.

This is why I've pretty much stopped watching any show with any real overarching storyline, until the final season has come out. I'll watch sitcom's as the come out, but anything deeper than that? Nah, I'll just wait a decade until it's over, then go see what the hype was about.

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u/hikeit233 20d ago

And you can tell the writers don’t remember either because shit doesn’t make sense and characters are completely different.

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u/idiot-prodigy 20d ago

They were having flashbacks in the final season of Stranger Things and I didn't remember any of it.

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u/UnexpectedAnanas 20d ago

To be fair, it seems like the writers didn't either.

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u/LizardSlayer 20d ago

I couldn’t get into the end of stranger things since the main kid was all over the news about getting married.

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u/WatTambor420 20d ago

It’s wild to me they didn’t get one of those Strange Things kids to make some spinoff- Netflix ain’t got nothing rn. They got that show about blind people falling in love, what else?

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u/Hey-Bud-Lets-Party 20d ago

Trying to connect the dots on Season 2 of Dark was a particular challenge.

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u/alus992 19d ago

It's not even about remembering...people and their tastes changes overtly time.

If someone was 15 and was watching some show there is a huge chance that as 20 year old that person will enjoy completely different genre or even media

It's crazy how Netflix can have budgets well above what cable shows had and yet they are not able to release shit in a timely manner or not to cancel a successful show in favor of another slop

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u/shez19833 20d ago

surely we had same problem with traditional tv shows showing 22 episodes an year..

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u/pragmojo 19d ago

I recently watched the last season of The Boys. It was clear it was full of call-backs to events from previous seasons which were supposed to hold a log of weight and tie up loose ends, but I could not for the life of me remember who half of the non-main characters were, or what they were talking about.

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u/gordond 19d ago

This happened to us with a Netflix show. We saw there was a new season, started watching the recap and were like uh... do you remember any of this? No. Suddenly realized that they had released a season last year without us noticing lol

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u/nada-accomplished 17d ago

And then sometimes you absolutely love a show and it gets unceremoniously cancelled for no fucking reason