By the time I discovered the magnificent alternative history SF show, For All Mankind, it was already four seasons in. Even so, by the time we were through it, there was still nearly a year’s wait for season five. Now, it’s another 18 months wait for season six.
Similarly, fans of the mind-bending corporate dystopia of Severance are expected to wait another 18 months for season three. The adaptation of One Piece left a whole two-and-half years between the first two seasons. No date has even been announced for season three.
Streaming services are rapidly finding out that fans are not nearly so patient.
The biggest player in streaming is easily Netflix, but viewership data shows a surprising problem area for the company: getting viewers to come back for a second season.
Netflix has a one-season problem with its biggest hits, report explains.
One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30 per cent of its audience for the second season. The latest season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of Netflix’s most-watched titles in 2024, suffered a drop of more than 60 per cent over week one.
Before we greybeards sniff at modern attention spans, it’s not confined to shows aimed at younger audiences. The Night Agent shed 50 per cent of its audience for the second season and another 35 per cent for its third season.
And these are just the shows fans agree are good adaptations. House of the Dragon suffered a similar drop and not just because of the long delay between seasons. Social media is awash with fans excoriating the enshittification of what started out as a solid show. Many are predicting the same fate for the otherwise well-regarded A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
As for the forthcoming Narnia series, book fans are already pillorying not just the selection of the uber-woke Greta Gerwig to direct, but the relentless race and gender-swapping. Ditto the upcoming Harry Potter series.
Long gaps between seasons only try audiences’ patience even further.
Long gaps, short episode counts and the binge-dump model have trained audiences to treat shows like fast food: consume quickly, move on and forget the details. By the time season two finally drops, viewers have moved on to the next shiny thing. Plot points blur. Emotional investment evaporates. “I’ve had more exes between seasons than episodes in the season,” one frustrated user summed up on X.
Traditional broadcast television understood human nature better. Weekly episodes built anticipation, water-cooler conversation, and genuine attachment. Characters had room to breathe across 16–22 episodes. Networks marketed shows consistently, not in a two-week blitz followed by radio silence. Viewership often grew over time as word spread. Apple TV+ is seeing similar loyalty with its more measured approach.
Netflix, by contrast, treats content like disposable products: flood the zone, chase the algorithm, repeat.
That’s if the show even renews at all. Despite nine novels’ worth of material, the audience-acclaimed space opera The Expanse finished abruptly after six seasons. The Hannibal show-runners were so accustomed to abrupt cancellations that they at least wrote each season to stand alone with its concluding episode. Mindhunter ended on a cliffhanger – and never came back.
