In recent years, Netflix has cancelled many shows. The streaming service has gotten bad reactions for cancelling too many shows, with fan favourites like Ozark, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Sense8, GLOW, Mindhunter, I Am Not Okay With This, The OA, The Society, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Santa Clarita Diet, Dark, Tuca and Bertie and One Day at a Time. They have been accused of shutting down productions for no apparent reason and doing so much more often than competitors such as Amazon Prime and HBO.

The cancellation of the shows outraged fans and some of them went ahead to create groups on social networks as to no longer subscribe to the service in protest that led to the platform to react on it.

Bela Bajaria, director of global programming at Netflix, explained that this was just a marketing strategy. He explains, “If you look at season twos and more, we actually have a renewal rate of 67%, which is industry standard,” Bajaria said, according to Deadline. “We also do make a large amount of first season shows, which sometimes feels that we have more first season cancellations but if you look at the renewal rate it’s really strong. I also think you have to look at The Crown, with season four launching now, Grace & Frankie and The Ranch, we’ve had long-running shows and we’re always going to have a mix that are great to be told in a limited series form and shows that go on for multiple seasons.” 

The platform’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos thinks it’s “disproportionately” big news when a Netflix show gets cancelled, and that the media is being too old-fashioned when thinking about this topic.

“It seems like in this new age of television, the business model is a little different,” he said. “The things that marked success prior to Netflix and OTT really had been getting to syndication, that was the goal and anything that didn’t get to 100 episodes or past the four seasons didn’t feel like a success, whereas I think many shows can be a success for being exactly what they are and you could tell that story in two seasons or one season or five seasons. I think it gets talked about so much because it’s measured against the old way of doing things.”

Also read: Saif Ali Khan is coming back to Netflix