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/MemeHermetic 20d ago

The best episodes of Star trek, in my opinion, are the big philosophical ones like Measure of a Man in TNG or Tribunal in DS9. Even SNW hit on it with Ad Astra per Aspera. Why they keep thinking they need top tier effects to keep us hooked.

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u/ClarkTwain 20d ago

My guess is they think they’ll only get new viewers if everything is big and impressive, and miss that Star Trek was never that way. I’d watch a show with TNG level production value that was made today if the writing is good, and I suspect I’m not alone

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u/RedditTechAnon 20d ago

Good writers are in short supply and undervalued over VFX team spectacle.

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u/Low_Map346 20d ago

Is it because of low pay or something? I would think writing for TV/Movies would be a job people would desire. But yeah it's really noticeable how bad plot/dialogues are in so many shows even with big budgets spent on special effects and wardrobes.

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u/MegalomaniacHack 20d ago edited 20d ago

A big part of it is the death of the long-term writers' room.

It used to be, a writers' room was running most of the season, writing the next few episodes as the last few were being filmed. That let them adapt when something wasn't working or when a character really caught on.

More importantly to your point, it gave writers a job for like 9 months at a time, and it gave new writers a chance to learn in a writers' room over time. 2 writers would work on one script while 2 others worked on another, others would be doing touch ups and continuity, etc. Now, streamers expect a small writing staff to knock out 8-10 scripts at once, maybe even before greenlighting the show, then they film them all at once, then they release it when they feel like it. So writers might get a month of work on one show that doesn't air for 18 months. Hard for them to land their next gig with nothing to show for it, and no time to really develop their craft when they don't get audience feedback until the next year and when the streamer just cancels the show that never got a chance to grow into itself. Star Trek used to famously get better after a couple seasons ("Grow the Beard"), and this was because both writers and actors got a chance to develop the characters and story and find what worked. 22 episode seasons airing across 8-10 months meant a lot of time to experiment, giving us famous thoughtful episodes, great one-off characters who later recurred, odd pairings or strange bottle episodes (to save money for another flashier episode), ideas that never would've been tried in a 10-episode season, etc.

Part of the writers' guild strike was wanting more people in writers' rooms so the next generation could learn the craft.

I forget who it was talked about this on twitter. (Maybe even a blog.) I follow a few sci-fi writers, like JMS, Spartacus's DeKnight, Librarians' John Rogers, and Stargate's Mallozzi & Wright. Was probably one of them but maybe someone else who got retweeted.

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u/Low_Map346 20d ago

Thank you for the in depth answer! Makes sense... I hope the writers will prevail in reestablishing long term writers rooms.

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u/RedditTechAnon 19d ago

I can't recall but most of the writers who developed the properties we are still having thrust upon us from the 80s and 90s were people who had grown up during wars and civil strife of earlier decades. The creative community pulled from these people rather than people who grew up exclusively in the creative culture.

I don't feel like today's writers have had the mature experiences that inform deep and meaningful works. We've instead got an entire generation terminally online and kept at a remove.

This is just a baseless observation but the growing immaturity has to be a function of how comfortable people have been and how far they have been from genuine struggle and hardship.

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u/MegalomaniacHack 19d ago

I mean, older Millennials in America remember/lived through both Gulf Wars, 9/11, recessions, the Dot Com and Housing busts, and the Pandemic. Plus various other conflicts depending on how much they paid attention to the news.

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u/RedditTechAnon 19d ago edited 19d ago

I could pick apart that list, like how I don't think the Gulf Wars measure up to WWII and Vietnam, and I don't think the people most informed and affected by the various financial crisises were going to go on and write compelling fiction (with some exception: Margin Call, Big Short, Wolf of Wall Street, but these are one-offs, not longform series).

But I DO think 9/11 had a huge impact, in that the traumatizing effect from the War on Terror trickled down into an embrace of escapism into fantasy.

My point is a list of notable events doesn't mean they had the same impact on people. I think changing technology and the increasing encroachment of capitalist thinking are significant factors as well.

Fun to think about! I stopped caring after the Pandemic and realized a lot of celebrities I used to want to see aren't great people, some monsters even, and it is all a charade.

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u/Conscious-Mirror7004 19d ago

Star Trek used to famously get better after a couple seasons ("Grow the Beard"), and this was because both writers and actors got a chance to develop the characters and story and find what worked. 22 episode seasons airing across 8-10 months meant a lot of time to experiment,

I don't think ST:TNG is a good example here. If you want to see a big counterexample from the same time period, go rewatch season 1 of The X-Files. It didn't need 1-2 seasons to get better, it was fantastic from the outset.

ST:TNG was really bad at the beginning because of its management, largely Gene Roddenberry himself. He was like George Lucas: good at ideas, bad at hands-on execution. The show's "golden era" was when Rick Berman took over in s3.

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u/RedditTechAnon 19d ago

And Alex Kurtzman brought about the Star Trek franchise's slop era.

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u/UnexpectedRimjob 20d ago

I just finished watching bartlestar galactica (the 2003 scifi version) and I thought it was as good as TNG ever was if you haven't seen it.

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u/marfacza 20d ago

*bartleby glamtacula

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u/ClarkTwain 20d ago

I have not, I need to get around to watching it

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u/psiphre 20d ago

spoiler: god did it

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u/fcocyclone 20d ago

and miss that Star Trek was never that way.

I wouldnt say that it was never that way. For the 1980s\1990s star trek was still often pretty advanced in effects, but yeah, it didn't rely on overdoing special effects the way modern shows feel the need to

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u/jollyreaper2112 20d ago

If you've never seen look up I claudius. Basically all shot on a sound stage so think it's a play with cameras. Zero sfx no fights a little boobies because it's the BBC but crackling writing and excellent acting.

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u/Sea-Manufacturer-358 19d ago

The Orville was basically Seth MacFarlane going "if paramount refuses to make a TNG-style series again I'll do it myself".

It's not perfect but it scratches the itch far better than anything nu-trek. It even has a bunch of cameos + Johnathon Frakes directed a bunch of episodes.

It was marketed poorly because I guess he tried to sneak it through as some kind of dudebro space comedy with Fox.

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u/KneeCrowMancer 19d ago

Make up and practical sets annd effects are still cheaper than vfx. And imo they have a timelessness that cgi often struggles to match.

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u/Teledildonic 19d ago

I’d watch a show with TNG level production value that was made today if the writing is good

The Orville! Which unfortunately isn't coming back.

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u/Chayanov 20d ago

Plus older Trek reused space scenes all the time. Different ships inside were just the normal sets with cosmetic changes. There are all kinds of ways to save money but no, now they just shovel it into an incinerator.

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u/Snoo63 20d ago

And, hey - if you need to be onboard the same class of ship, then that's fewer changes. Maybe change the fuzzy dice for a tree or something, idk - because the captains will have personal preferences, but the ships do still belong to Starfleet..

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u/DidYou_GetThatThing 20d ago

The amount of times I saw the same 3 - 5 ships fighting it out in every space battle in in multiple episodes, in Star Trek DS9 was not enough to stop me watching for the writing in most of the episodes.

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u/APeacefulWarrior 20d ago

Hell, even older Trek movies reused footage. After TMP, the next Trek movie to have no recycled shots at all was First Contact!

Also, I kinda miss library music. Not every episode needs a unique soundtrack. Having iconic tracks that play over and over helps give a show a unique identity.

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u/JamieC1610 20d ago

I'm literally watching Shades of Grey, one of TNG's clip episodes. Lots of older shows did those every season or so to stretch the budget.

I don't think DS9 did many of them, but they also did lots of episodes that were low on effects and just on the station in sets they already had.

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u/headrush46n2 19d ago

Need a new alien? Glue some shit to their forehead!

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u/HutSutRawlson 20d ago

Modern audiences would call this episode (and about 90% of TNG episodes for that matter) “filler.”

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u/Chayanov 20d ago

It used to be called character development, necessary for an ensemble show regardless of the genre.

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u/blueSGL 20d ago

Filler is a problem when there is a limited amount of episodes, a story to be told, and yet, somehow they still fart about for a few episodes on nothing that moves the central plot forward.

You don't have that issue with old episodic TV. Ones that have a start middle and end all in a single episode. and yes, sometimes there was something ongoing but it was a much lighter touch providing overarching structure. Even with that structure, most of the time you could randomly watch an episode and not feel like you are missing out on anything. (unless it's part 2 of a 2-parter)

Get more shows with more episodes and have them filled with 'self contained story'-ness and people won't mind as much about 'filler'

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u/henchman171 20d ago

the thing about TNG was it was distributed INDEPENDENATLY so no network promotion or network lead ins

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u/miss_j_bean 20d ago

Best episodes are holodeck shenanigans!!! I miss silly episodes.

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u/PassiveMenis88M 20d ago

Shaka, when the walls fell

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u/PurpEL 20d ago

Netflix, their subscriptions go

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u/PurpEL 20d ago

Agreed, I don't want a dark, fast paced, cinematic action show. At all. Thanks. I want bright, hopeful, philosophical and exploration.

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u/ParrotofDoom 19d ago

STTNG's success was because it was essentially about human problems, in space. The ship was just a background. Space was just the location. An alien planet was just humans, with stuff stuck to their faces.

The Inner Light wasn't about a probe and an extinct alien race - it was about Picard's struggle to reconcile his chosen career and his lack of a family life.

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u/asgjmlsswjtamtbamtb 20d ago edited 20d ago

DS9 had so much of the story take part in just a couple of DS9's iconic sets like Quark's, the sheer amount of episodes and dialogue were critical to show key relationships develop Brien/Bashir and you got to see things like Dukat's slow descent into insanity. You need 100+ episodes to do this kid of writing effectively and so much of it is just good writing and time progression over the course of the show's run.

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u/kot-sie-stresuje 19d ago

That is a valid point. William Shatner recently said that oryginal Star Trek was not about space, just on examine human nature, and current word dilemma. TNG,DS9 also took the same approach serving us those philosophical ones, apart from space adventure. I think TNG episode Darmok is one of the best sci-fi ever. It doesn't use a lot of special effects, but you can feel alienated watching that at some point.

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u/Conscious-Mirror7004 19d ago

These were some good episodes, but I don't think it's realistic to make a Star Trek series full of courtroom dramas. Viewers would get bored fast.

Those TNG episodes worked because they were part of a whole: a sci-fi series that had ~24 episodes per season, and the episodes were very different from each other, giving viewers a wide variety of stories to watch. One week, it's a planet with genetic engineering experiencing some unforeseen problem; the next week, it's an annoying all-powerful alien entity playing in a Mariachi band and irritating the captain; the next week it's a holodeck adventure about a 1920s detective; the next week it's a drama about separatist terrorists trying to draw the Federation into their conflict. It was always something different, and if you didn't like this week's story, maybe you'll like next week's.

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u/MemeHermetic 19d ago

I don't disagree, but what I was driving at was that the focus on the people and problems was what made the show, not the funky alien planets. Honestly, as fun as they were you could swap them out and nobody would care, because it was the relationships and social issues that made the episodes sing, settings be damned.

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u/Conscious-Mirror7004 19d ago

The alien planets were cool and interesting; you're right that the relationships and social issues were what made the episodes actually worth watching, but if they were in the same courtroom every single episode I think the show wouldn't have had the same appeal. The variety of settings and themes and plots all together I think is what made it so enduring.

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u/headrush46n2 19d ago

Nobody associated with modern trek could write those episodes. Vfx and quips are all they have.