Constantly canceling shows rewires audiences’ brains

The Future. It turns out that never letting a show go more than a season or two has some serious drawbacks. Audiences are just deciding to wait for a show to finish before watching. That’s a huge issue when studios and streamers make many of their renewal decisions while the show is airing. Armed with this data, they may wait a beat before preemptively canceling shows — it may take a beat before you know if you have a hit on your hands.

Here for a short time, not a long time
According to a YouGov survey, 46% of US adults sometimes or always wait for the finale of a streaming show before starting it.

Why?

• 48% say because they prefer binge-watching shows
• 27% say because they don’t want to watch a show just for it to get canceled with an unresolved ending
• 24% don’t want to have to wait for the next season if the current season ends on a cliffhanger

In one of the wildest data points, 31% of US adults believe that one to three shows they’ve started in the past couple of months had already been canceled. Basically, almost a third of audiences just assume that some of the shows they’ve started have been canceled.

And with shows just suddenly disappearing even after they’re shot, it’s no wonder people don’t feel the need to keep subscribing to a service from month to month.