The great Netflix turn-off

Music fans will be familiar with the curse of the difficult second album, when an act they like follows up a wonderful debut record with a disappointing one (think Second Coming by the Stones Roses or U2’s October). Football supporters are well versed in discussing second season syndrome, the phenomenon where a newly promoted side far exceeds expectations in its first Premier League season before dropping away in the next campaign (Birmingham City in 2011 and Sheffield United in 2021 spring to mind).

Netflix bosses may be forgiven for worrying about second series syndrome. The entertainment world is abuzz with chatter about how recent follow-ups to some of the streaming giant’s most popular shows have struggled to get anywhere near as many viewers as the original outings.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, was asked about the trend when unveiling the company’s financial results on Thursday, and attempted to prove the doubters wrong. “It’s very common in the industry, but it’s even more so with us because we launch our shows so big,” he said. “Our global reach, our discovery mechanism, releasing all at once… This enables us to find a very large audience early, so our shows tend to start really big while most other places, their shows start pretty small and occasionally grow from there.” Sarandos added: “Our season-two fall-off is actually slightly improved this year relative to last year.”

Despite meeting Wall Street’s financial expectations, the Netflix share price slid after it reported its numbers; the market value is down 18 per cent this year and more than 50 per cent over the past 12 months, wiping billions off its worth. Investors, at the very least, are worried about Netflix’s problems. As for viewers, they’re left with the growing sense that the world’s number-one streaming service is running out of shows worth watching.

A brief glance at Netflix’s own viewing data – it publishes the top-10 most-watched films and TV shows weekly – illustrates what has been described as a growing source of concern. The second series of The Four Seasons, Tina Fey’s couples comedy series, had fewer than half the viewers of its debut in its first four weeks (32.9 million vs 14.5 million). The Night Agent, the FBI thriller series, has gradually dropped from racking up 73.9 million views in the first four weeks of its first series, to 40.9 million views of its second, to 26.7 million of its third.

The Four Seasons

The Night Agent

At time of writing, the second series of Avatar: The Last Airbender has only been available for three weeks. But while the first series, one of Netflix’s most watched in 2024, had 50.2 million views in that time, its follow-up only pulled in 23.5 million. The first series of Wednesday, the Jenna Ortega Addams Family smash hit that is the all-time most-watched show on Netflix, had 252.1 million views in the three months after its 2022 launch; the second garnered 119.3 million views in the same time period after it was released in two batches last year.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Wednesday

There are outliers, of course. The fourth and fifth series of Stranger Things are third and fourth, respectively, on Netflix’s all-time list of popular English language series and ahead of the show’s first instalments; Bridgerton has continued to add more viewers after series two.

So why is this happening? Since Bloomberg published a story about this phenomenon earlier this month, many explanations have been offered without being definitive. Some have suggested that the long gaps between series is behind the soft numbers for follow-ups, but the drop-off is as real for the second instalment of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s fantasy show that had three years between instalments, as Ted Danson’s A Man on the Inside, the first series of which topped the weekly Netflix chart on debut but didn’t make it on to the top 10 list for the second one year on.

The Sandman

Others reckon that Netflix’s typical release model – which allows viewers to binge-watch series rather than building interest with weekly episodes – is to blame. Shows such as HBO’s The White Lotus and The Pitt have grown their audiences by keeping viewers hooked and evolved into word-of-mouth hits by becoming what is known in the industry jargon as appointment-to-view.

And then there is the perception held by some that the quality of Netflix’s output just isn’t up to much – that it is hard to find much that is actually worth watching. “Most Netflix shows are not great”, Vulture, the entertainment news site, quoted an executive at one of Netflix’s rivals as saying this week. “So when these not-great shows go away for a year and a half or two and then come back, nobody cares. Nobody’s built a lasting relationship with them, and so they move on.” Other series, such as The Boroughs, were reasonably popular but got cancelled after just one outing.

It is something of a puzzler. “You can’t just go: ‘Why this is happening is because X.’ It’s a bunch of things,” Tom Harrington, head of TV at research outfit Enders Analysis, tells me. “Some of the shows might just be bad. Some of it might just be they came out at a time when there was another, better show on somewhere else, or [elsewhere] on Netflix.”

And to be fair to Netflix, this is not just an issue with which it contends. All of its rivals have to deal with what Harrington calls the “natural attrition” of falling viewer numbers as a series progresses. “Every TV show, bar a few, loses viewers – that’s the gravity of TV,” he says.

Then there are the structural issues that the entire mainstream entertainment industry is dealing with: namely, the continued growth of YouTube and social media dragging eyeballs away from more traditional films and series. “It’s a lot harder for everybody in terms of long-form viewing, because a lot of it’s been taken away by short-form viewing,” says Harrington. “And it’s going to naturally become more difficult to hold on to viewers.”

Netflix appears to be at a crossroads after more than a decade of relentless success and growth – remember, the streamer only started showing its own original series when it launched House of Cards in 2013 – in which it has become the world’s undisputed number-one entertainment company. It surprised many when it agreed a deal to buy the streaming and studio assets of Warner Bros Discovery, which would have given it a huge library to populate its streaming service, only to be gazumped by Paramount.

In some ways, Netflix is a victim of its own success and its commitment to transparency. It is the only one of the big streamers or broadcasters to publish weekly viewership data that can be turned into a stick with which to beat it, while it also makes a point of releasing engagement reports every six months that go into great detail about its most popular series and films.

Perhaps as an implicit acknowledgement that its bosses are uncomfortable with the scrutiny that comes with being the world’s pre-eminent entertainment outlet, Netflix will now only publish the massive engagement report once a year from January. “Netflix is running a familiar play when a metric gets uncomfortable: it shifts the spotlight,” wrote Mike Proulx, at Forrester Research. “Pulling back engagement reporting at the exact moment engagement is in the spotlight gives off a strong ‘nothing to see here’ vibe.”

It is not totally clear from where salvation will come. Recent releases such as Little House on the Prairie and The Hawk have not exactly been a hit with critics. Summer highlights include the Lockerbie drama The Bombing of Pan Am 103, an animated series from Ricky Gervais and… not much else.

For the rest of the year, Netflix is pinning its hopes on returning series such as Black Doves, the festive Keira Knightley spy thriller that is expected in the winter, and Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen in September to boost viewers. Debuting series include a new Pride and Prejudice starring Emma Corrin, Jack Lowden and Olivia Colman.

And it is branching out into areas that its bosses had previously suggested it would rather avoid. So it is that Netflix is increasingly getting into live sport, launching games, putting podcasters Gary Lineker and Jay Shetty on screen and striking deals to put videos from publishers BuzzFeed and Condé Nast on the service.

These pivots are “out of character”, according to Harrington. “They used to be very focused and very disciplined around ‘This is what we are, this is what we do, we don’t make acquisitions, we don’t have ads, we don’t do sport, we have a very clean product offering.’ And then things get a little bit harder, and things slow down, and then they have to break some of the rules that they have.”

Is it an identity crisis? “I think that they’ll probably say, ‘Well, we’re trying to expand our offering rather than not knowing who we are, and some things will work and some things won’t work,'” Harrington adds. “I guess they’ll lean into what works. They can’t just live off House of Cards for ever.”

Netflix shows certainly feel less important, less all-consuming, in our continually fragmenting culture. The time when the world seemed united in its obsession with, say, The Crown feels like an age ago. The best way for the streamer to quieten its sceptics is to deliver some new smash-hit productions. That is easier said than done, of course.

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