The real reason why Netflix keeps cancelling your favourite shows

It was supposed to be Netflix’s big pre-Christmas smash but, weeks after setting sail, 1899’s number is up. The mind-bending multidimensional thriller has been cancelled with just one season under its belt – provoking predictable protests from its small, albeit vocal, fanbase and the inevitable online petition to bring it back.

The show’s failure is a surprise on many levels. It was the brainchild of Netflix’s golden team of Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, the German couple behind slow-burn hit Dark. That series racked up millions of views by taking the Stranger Things formula of pesky kids investigating a supernatural conspiracy and swaddling it in Teutonic gloom.

If anything, Friese and Odar appeared to be on to an even surer thing with 1899. There was the atmospheric setting of a 19th-century ocean liner, the Kerberos, crewed by a rogue’s gallery of heroes, villains and sundry malcontents. Plus, a dimension-hopping mystery that, as teased in the trailers, seemingly involved time travel and – always a good thing – a scary child. On paper, it read like Titanic meets Downton Abbey via JJ Abrams’s Lost. With a $60 million budget, it was also the most expensive German TV project of all time and so lavish production values were assured. What could go wrong?

Lots, it turns out. Though Odar only recently revealed that 1899 had been cancelled – his and Friese’s overall deal with Netflix continues – Netflix apparently broke the news to the producers in December, four weeks after 1899 launched. For a $60 million punt to be written off after a month feels like an overreaction. Then Netflix has never been a company to stand on ceremony.

On the face of it, 1899 was a decent-sized hit. True, it was a long way behind Netflix’s real November surprise, Wednesday – the Addams Family spinoff which has revived the career of Tim Burton, made a superstar of Jenna Ortega and introduced Gen Z to the radical concept of wearing black in public. Nonetheless, Friese and Odar’s spooky puzzle box ratcheted up millions of views and debuted at number two in the Netflix global top 10.

But given the budget and expectations, it simply didn’t do well enough. It also suffered poor word of mouth. While 1899 delivered its share of twists, culminating in a satisfyingly hair-raising payoff in the final episode, many viewers may have felt they had seen it all before. (Beware: spoilers follow.)

We had been promised a period piece crammed with secrets. Yet, by the end of the first episode, it was clear that the Kerberos was merely a computer simulation. And that the entire story was a glorified episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. Nobody was what they appeared. Glitches in reality were the work of dystopian mainframes creaking and groaning behind the scenes. In other words, Charlie Brooker with a German accent.

Once you’d worked that out – and who hadn’t? – everything that followed felt like padding. 1899 is further hobbled by the traditional Netflix problem of too much content spread too thinly. From the laborious House of Cards of a decade ago to the recent Harry and Meghan documentary, Netflix has made an art form out of stuffing its television with filler. 1899 suffered that worse than most – and unlike Harry & Meghan, it couldn’t string you along with the promise of juicy anecdotes about Harry having a shouting match with Prince William.

The series was also much too cold to the touch. Emily Beecham did her best as Maura, a neurologist who claimed to be travelling on her own to America but was in reality searching for her missing brother. As did Anton Lesser, as Henry Singleton, Maura’s father and the creepy owner of the Kerberos.

Alas, neither scored very highly for likeability. Nor did the rest of the characters. They were an unappealing hodgepodge of socialites from across Europe and a “downstairs” rag-tag toiling in the stygian bowels of the boat. Regardless of their station, all lacked any trace of warmth. Long before the mystery played out, audiences could be forgiven for losing interest. 1899 had all the humanity of an opaque pane of glass.

Yet these are ultimately extraneous details. To solve the puzzle of 1899’s cancellation it is necessary to look beyond aesthetics and dig into the numbers. Because while subscribers watched a pretty whopping 257 million hours of 1899, a mere 32 per cent made it through the entire eight-episode season (according to figures by UK data analytics company Digital i). Compare that with the 80 per cent who completed the mega-hit Squid Game, the 73 per cent who got through Heartstopper or the 60 per cent who binged steampunk animation Arcane, and it’s no mystery that 1899 found itself in the danger zone.

That completion rates matter to Netflix more than top-of-the-line viewing figures was recently confirmed by Sandman author Neil Gaiman. He urged devotees of the Netflix adaptation of the series to make sure they watched all the way through. Sandman was expensive to make, he said. The more people binged to the end, the better the odds of a Netflix renewal.

“They are looking at completion rates,” he said. “So people watching it at their own pace [i.e. not bingeing immediately] don’t show up.”

The biggest mystery of all is why Netflix is so obsessed with completion rates. One theory is that viewers who watch a series all the way through are more likely to renew their subscription – which is all Netflix ultimately cares about. Critical buzz and a place in the water-cooler conversation are fine. Yet the bottom line is that it’s all about a) audiences continuing to pay for their Netflix fix every month and b) attracting new subscribers.

“As far as I can tell, everything Netflix does is based on how it’s driving subscriber growth,” Baby Sitters Club creator Rachel Shukert told Vulture. However, she stressed that this was merely her best guess: Netflix never actually tells producers or directors what targets must be achieved to be renewed. “I want to be very careful because it’s a lot of conjecture, but I feel like Netflix’s internal metrics can change month to month. Something that was fine three months ago is suddenly not what they need.”

Either way, with a completion rate of less than half that of Squid Game, 1899 was up against it. There is also the issue of the landscape having changed radically since Dark debuted in 2017. This year’s headline-grabbing shows have been all about spectacle, from the roaring dragons in House of the Dragon to the howling plotholes in Amazon's $1 billion Tolkien travesty The Rings Of Power.

With impressive ratings and a devoted following 1899, didn’t quite hit an iceberg. But while decent audience numbers were once sufficient for a cult series to stay afloat, that is no longer enough. As demonstrated by the blockbuster figures posted by Wednesday – one billion viewing hours and counting – to rank as a success nowadays a drama must truly soar. In the end, 1899 couldn’t escape gravity. And so, was doomed to sink without a trace.