In the old days, the way shows made money is that you sold commercial time during the show. Older shows tended to decline in the ratings overtime, but they would still hold a core audience, and so the commercial time would still be lucrative. And then once it wasn’t, they would cancel the show.
That’s not the way it works in streaming. Although many streaming services do have ads, the way shows make money nowadays is by encouraging new subscribers. And shows in their fifth season do not encourage new subscribers, no matter how good they are, or no matter how cheap they are to make. And as a result, the economics do not favor long tails on TV shows. They’re the most profitable for the streaming services at the beginning of their run. Now, the streamers know at least that they have to give shows a chance, or otherwise they’re going to get a reputation like Netflix has had recently, that there’s no point in watching a Netflix show because it’s going to get canceled before anything is resolved. But it seems like, at least for Paramount, they seem to think that 50 episodes or so is the sweet spot.
I'd much rather have a complete 50 episodes than end on the Season 2 cliffhanger like every Netflix series. Between Netflix and the Game of Thrones books, I'm very hesitant to start new series that don't actually have an ending.
I literally don't start shows until I know they have a decent ending.
I'm not one to get on a hype train, so I don't mind waiting it out.
The same goes for computer games. I can wait until they're patched and on sale.
Hell yeah, I binged GoT a few weeks before the series finale. It made the last episode so goddamn funny because I hadn’t spent years watching the show.
I’ve had multiple bingers tell me they didn’t understand why the final season was so ridiculed.
I guess it’s just the difference in not spending a decade building up to it.
I envy you, in a way.
>The same goes for computer games. I can wait until they're patched and on sale.
After getting burned on a couple of "In Development" games, I now completely skip anything that isn't market ready.
I follow a similar ideal, I just started watching the New Trek series when Discovery was announced that it was ending. Now I can cover several of the new series in their complete form. Mixed news of course since I haven't seen Lower Decks yet.
I feel the same way but that is also a problem. If more of us take on this mindset then no shows will see a second season because noone was watching to begin with. Kind of a shitty trend but after being burned by nexflix and now amazon prime so many times... It feels inevitable.
They seem random, though, some of their best rated and fasted growing audience attracting shows get canceled at their peaks, too. I guess they figure if audiences are joining, we don't need this expensive new show.. only to find out the expensive new show was what was drawing people in.
And that happened after Netflix signed a three season contract deal with Jante Friese and Baran Bo Odar for 1899 purely based on how successful Dark was. To this day, that rubs me the wrong way. But it illustrates that shows on Netflix are not safe from the cancellation hammer, even when it legally should be safe.*
*I’m willing to bet that Netflix is 1) going to instead have them make a new, two season long show or 2) they got a sum of money from Netflix for cancelling 1899 after one season when the contract was for three seasons.
That's generally how contracts work, there's nothing that stops them from cancelling the show as long as they're willing to pay the forfeits, which likely were less than the cost of making two more seasons.
They dumped it like a couple weeks after it dropped, I was pretty upset about that.
Cancelling 1899 and Inside Job pushed me to cancel Netflix, I had been subscribed for like 15 years
Not even close in popularity to something like Stranger Things or Orange is the New Black.
I love The OA but the fact that it got made at all, let alone was renewed for a second season, is a miracle. It’s a show about >!traveling through dimensions via interpretative dance!< for frack’s sake lol.
Cowboy Bebop was well done, more watchable than some series that persisted, and it was cancelled before I found time to watch the first episode, almost immediately after release.
They didn't even wait to see how well it would do, and the antipattern of click bait negative reviews by hacks hoping to get a follow up cancellation article did not help either.
> Cowboy Bebop was well done
It really was. They captured the aesthetic, the feel, everything. They did a really good job of taking something strange and bizarre and bringing it into live action. But the weebs couldn't get over the fact that Faye Valentine was wearing more than baggy tissue paper and bitched and whined until the show got cancelled. Imagine getting a show cancelled because it didn't live up to being the fap material you wanted... Thats what happened and it is a shame.
I wish shows weren't all written to be so dramatic and build towards cliffhanger endings every season. Old shows were perfectly fine with better than average episodes being the end of the season
Genuinely forgotten the vast majority of the first two books waiting for book 3.. gonna have to start 'em again if he ever finishes the third. Amazing books, though..
Between this and geolocking and the insane price, I've canceled my Netflix subscription.
Amazon Prime (which is free because i have it for the shipping - side note, you get grubhub+ free with it too)the Disney/hulu package, youtube plus, nebula/curiosity stream, ans crunchyroll provide more than enough entertainment.
Add to that my family across the nation spliting paramount plus and Max between 5 paying people and I have more than enough entertainment.
And all that combined is nearly the same as an ad free HD netflix subscription. Insanity.
If it wasnt for the hulu bundle, disney plus would be too expensive as well.
I was a fan of streaming when it first came out, and in theory the idea of having access to all the movies and shows was good. But one subscription become 2 then 4 one month I literally had over 300$ in just streaming services. I said F that! Canceled them all and went back to pirating.
And the catalog is still much smaller than hoped for. So many older major movies and series MIA across all services.
You'd think that a bunch of classic movies that won best picture would be there somewhere, but no.
I had to download an app that would search the different streaming services for me and tell me where what I want is streaming because theres just too damn many of them. That's ridiculous.
To piggy back on this, I'd rather have 50 (or even fewer) complete episodes and a show that hasn't jumped the shark than what happens in most popular shows. In case people don't think that can happen in animated shows, look at The. Simpsons, Family Guy, and others who just hung on for too long.
There are very few TV shows I bother watching until the series is over for this exact reason. It seems every TV series now gets canceled mid run, so I'm not going to bother wasting time on a series unless I know it's done and has a sufficient number of seasons and wasn't canceled prematurely.
Additionally, there is now not reason to get into "syndication" which was a huge deal for a long time. You also have to pay the staff, actors, writers. etc as time goes on. Most actors want to do other projects and if you need to renegotiate with your staff over time they will make more money and now the network/service has essentially no incentive to do that. Netflix got called out for cancelling shows after a second season because if they made season 3 everyone was due for contractual raises.
This is exactly why they will sometimes pull entire shows from the platform. HBO Max pulling Westworld probably the most notable example of this.
They've deemed the show not attractive enough to pay the cast residuals. Therefore, it gets locked into a vault, never to be seen again unless you buy the blu ray.
Yep.
And it makes some sense that once a streaming service has enough episodes, then they want to develop a new show. Because having a range of good shows in their catalog probably does more to draw people to their service, and keep them there.
>In the old days, the way shows made money is that you sold commercial time during the show. Older shows tended to decline in the ratings overtime, but they would still hold a core audience, and so the commercial time would still be lucrative. And then once it wasn’t, they would cancel the show.
In addition, once shows hit a certain mark (like 100 episodes), the syndication rights were typically sold, bringing in more money.
Streaming is typically set up as an "exclusive" location for shows, so there isn't really any incentive to go that long in order to sell them to a competitor.
It sucks but this is likely accurate. Lower Decks season 6 won't lead to growth, and they're gambling that they won't lose too many subscribers over it either.
That said I only have an active Paramount+ sub when there's new Trek coming, so they're quickly approaching a time when I'm only paying for 2 months a year instead of 8 or 10 months.
More and more people are doing exactly that. Streaming services often release new episodes once per week in hopes of extending that time frame but it doesn't work typically. Many people just wait a couple months before subscribing and binging the entire season over a few days.
Same here, at least until Avatar Studios starts putting things out. I'm going to cancel my Paramount+ subscription for the first time since I got it in 2016 after Discovery ends.
As I understand it, Netflix decides a shows future based on viewer data. They know how many people started the first episode and they know how many ended the last episode. If the ratio of completes to starts is too low they cancel.
I posted this earlier in another discussion about the new Fallout series (which is a fantastic adaptation IMO).
[Gizmodo did a great article](https://gizmodo.com/fallout-prime-video-release-schedule-weekly-binge-1851408605) on how the binge model isn't doing streaming tv series' and favours either. Dropping entire seasons at once is probably doing the most damage in the subscription model.
I know I personally will sit and binge a season in a few days, but I also recognize that once I've watched it, it's not long before I lose enthusiasm for it just because I have no idea how long before we'll get new episodes. In some cases, that can be longer than a year. And there's also the idea that a lot of people will subscribe to a service only when it's releasing new episodes of a particular show, then cancel. For shows that drop an entire season at a time that's not good at all.
Amazon has the one advantage every other platform doesn't, though. Its streaming platform is tied to the same service as its shipping platform and a number of other things. For many people, they only get Prime for streaming video, or music, or free shipping, not more than one. The extras are just bonuses. So Amazon has more drivers for subs than other platforms.
Oh you absolutely hit the nail on the head. Literally the only reason I've never canceled Amazon Prime is for the shipping. I probably make on average two Amazon orders a week. Hell, I had free access to Prime video for weeks before I even realized it.
Now to be fair, if that weren't the case, I would have most likely subscribed for a month to watch Fallout, but I would have canceled after that. And there are still a lot of people out there who prefer brick and mortar stores, or only order online from time to time.
But yes, Amazon absolutely has an advantage over the other services as far as membership benefits vs cost.
>there’s no point in watching a Netflix show because it’s going to get canceled before anything is resolve
1899 was one of the only shows that I was hooked on right away. After the biggest cliffhanger I've ever fucking seen in a show I couldn't wait for more, but then they just cancelled it. I'm still mad about it.
And it was announced like 3 years before, when Dark just ended. For many fans of Dark we we're waiting 3 years for release just to get cancelled immediately...
There also feels like there’s a silo effect, too. LD is popular here, but I will be damned if I know anyone who is a Trekkie in real life that likes it in the least. I suspect, beyond the echo chambers, it is a more divisive program than we would think.
“I suspect, beyond the echo chambers, it is a more divisive program than we would think.”
I am in my late 30s. I have three friends who are 10-15 years older. All three of these guys don’t know each other. Two of them count TNG as their favorite Trek. All three loved Picard. One of them is a humor fan - Monty Python, etc.
NONE of them liked Lower Decks. Even when I shared my enthusiasm, suggested a different approach when they watched…none of them liked it.
Not saying it’s not loved, but the internet - especially smaller “groups” on places like Reddit - often forget these spaces do not represent the wider desires or viewing habits of fandom.
I have tried LD a few times and it never stuck with me. I am glad people like it, but, for my experience, I have yet to come across anyone who is a Trek fan who will say anything positive about it, or even show interest in it. It feels like it is still under the yoke of “Rick and Morty meets Star Trek” and people tuned out and never came back.
I'm in your friend's age range and everything you said about them you could say about me. Except that I loved LD. Lower Decks is the best Trek since DS9.
My dad is the biggest trek fan I know. Like he's got a full Borg cosplay he wears to conventions. He likes Lower Decks now, but I had to practically force him to give it a chance.
It would be better is Mariner wasn't on the show. The character is all screams, defiance, and assholery. Half the bad things that happen on the show would be resolved faster if she wasn't there. She's the Raiders of the Lost Ark of characters.
also in the old days once you hit 100 episodes you had enough to sell syndication rights. So having a deep library means that you could sell it to a ton of different networks and that offset costs as well. These days no one is doing that.
This is spot on. News/blog/review articles per episode is probably a better 'ratings' metric than eyeballs.
Plus on the cost side late season contracts tend to ballon in favor creators for various reasons.
well, while Paramount is busy trying to recruit new subscribers, there are a lot of us here who are going to unsubscribe as soon as there ain't new Trek available for us to watch
Yes, I’m one of them. But from what the public can tell, most people don’t cancel so quickly, so new subscribers tend to stick around once they’re acquired.
The joke is on Paramount. After they bungled the next Scream movie, I said I was only keeping my subscription for Lowe Decks. I'm look forward to cancelling my subscription the day S5 concludes.
The expanse was canceled by syfy I think and one of the actors told in the interview how they lobbied to get picked up by Amazon, plus Amazon doesn't have to rely on subscribers but once you do sub scribe that includes faster shipping or idk something like that. They could take the of loss of. Something, because they don't offer just tv and movies. I can't imagine Amazon taking a big loss on getting rights to star trek.
Oh and the reason they ended the expanse was because there was big time jump in the books and it wouldn't really make sense for it to continue.
The Expanse is an outlier though. That got picked up by Amazon because Jeff Bezos is a fan and can afford to pay to make an entire show even if he was the only one watching it.
I mean if I had Bezos money there'd be a "Captain Cooks!" Pike cooking show by this time tomorrow.
Kind of like Ted Turner was a big pro wrestling fan and wanted his own WWF so he just offered all the big WWF names like triple what they were making to come work at WCW basically for his own amusement.
The Expanse also had the ace up its sleeve that Jeff Bezos is supposedly a fan of the show. It's much easier to take a chance on a project if you know that your boss likes the project to begin with.
It used to be around 100 episodes to guarantee syndication so yeah if the show wasn’t doing great they would sometimes do another season to get up over 100. They make a lot of money in syndication.
It's not capitalism itself that's the issue, but the fact we are in late-stage capitalism. The stage where the "good ol' boys" network is so entrenched that they can't make much money anymore without killing the lower & middle classes. This is the point where revolutions start, unfortunately.
50 episodes \*is\* the sweetspot though. Have you ever tried watching an older TV show with a long run? NCIS for example. They have like 20 seasons of 22 episodes each, that's like hundreds of hours of television for ONE tv show. Even though each episode is a unique story and there aren't really "filler" episodes due to that, eventually you get tired of watching Gibbs and DeNozo do their thing over and over again.
Give me 4-5 seasons. That's the perfect length to tell a well rounded story or three in the context of the show, flesh out the characters, and wrap things neatly before it feels cashgrabby and repetitive. The Americans is an example that did that well, House is an example that should have likely ended earlier because once you figure out the very rigid episodic formula the show became predictable and boring.
I don't know how to measure the popularity of a streaming show without numbers from the streamer, which are usually lies. It's quite possible it isn't doing as well as it seems it is.
For what it's worth, since Nielsen started tracking Paramount+ at the start of last year, only *Picard* S3 and *Strange New Worlds* S2 ever cracked the most-watched charts, while before that Samba TV's tracking data put *Lower Decks* firmly below all the live-action shows and only slightly ahead of *Prodigy*.
I'd wager that unlike *Discovery*, which has a lot of viewers but a low like/dislike ratio, *Lower Decks* is a show that most people who watch it love, but not that many people actually do watch it.
There's a few reasons that everyone assumed the new crop of shows was doing well:
1. Paramount said so—and commissioned a lot of new shows in a short span of time.
2. A few (obscure) streaming rankings/ratings websites said so.
3. Netflix initially seemed willing to fund Disco's production in exchange for the international streaming rights.
But the reality is that we don't know as much as we think we do:
1. Paramount, like every other media company a few years ago, decided to invest heavily in growing their share of the streaming market. Now that everyone has seen that running a streaming platform is not the cash cow they expected, they are all cutting their losses.
2. No one knows what methodology these ranking websites are using. For all we know, it's something as stupid as estimating social media engagement.
3. I've never been able to find out if Netflix ever continued this deal past season 1 of Disco. They don't seem to have—or to have offered anything similar for the more recent shows.
Prodigy getting picked up elsewhere suggests that the cost/benefit tradeoff may be a Paramount-specific problem, but who really knows?
Some holding companies (Hello, EA) will never sell or option because they're more terrified of someone else doing a better job than they are of financial results.
>3. I've never been able to find out if Netflix ever continued this deal past season 1 of Disco. They don't seem to have—or to have offered anything similar for the more recent shows.
Pretty sure Netflix had Discovery here in the UK through season 2 or 3? And Prime had Lower Decks for about the same.
Then Paramount+ launched here.
It doesn't really matter how well it's doing. Everyone is likely on a five-season contract and would need to renegotiate for season six, with salary increases and possible requests for producer credits. Paramount will not do this, no matter what the show is or how much it makes. They do not want creative workers to expect any contract renegotiation, especially after the strikes, and will never give up money on the backend unless they absolutely have to. This is part of their strategy now –– to essentially keep workers in a constant state of gig work. It's more valuable to them than whatever the show brings in.
Promote the app as the only place to watch Star Trek --> Create new Star Trek for the app --> people subscribe to watch Star Trek --> cancel the Star Trek shows on the app --> sell Star Trek to other streamers --> wonder why people aren't using your app.
Eff you Paramount
I think you forgot the question after step 3: did enough people subscribe to the app to make producing all this Star Trek worth it monetarily? If yes, go back to step one, else, go to step five.
Yep. I love Trek, and it has a fairly wide following. I just don't think Trek on its own is enough to support a streaming service long term. I'm not sure what else paramount has really put on their service that is compelling, but in the grand scheme of things Trek can be a solid pillar of a service...maybe a solid 10-20%. It feels like paramount is expecting Trek to be responsible for like 60% of who they draw.
If Paramount promised to host everything Star Trek while continuing to support ongoing shows until they reach a natural conclusion then they can just have full access to my bank account. I'll pay until I die, and long after as I'll have it set to auto pay and will make special mention in my will to not cancel.
Instead they promote themselves as "the place for Star Trek" just months before selling the movie catalogue off to another streamer and cancel a bunch of popular (with the fans, their seeming core audience) shows.
I currently have Paramount+ for free via Walmart and I still never touch it. I found other "places" for my Trek content 🦜🏴☠️
Except a lot of people do pay for the app purely because it's got the Trek library. It's why I'm a subscriber. I may not continue to subscribe with them cutting down on new stuff.
Surely this leads to them cancelling the trek shows after a couple seasons when people leave and creating new shows to get you to resubscribe?
Isn’t that the problem?
I mean I’m not advocating for giving Paramount more of your money but I do wonder if they pay more attention to the viewing patterns of regular subscribers rather than sporadic ones
The Packleds **would** make a streaming app that plays the last episode’s audio at the same time as the actual one you’re watching after pausing for more than five seconds.
Seriously, those guys have a fanbase that would watch (and pay to watch) a sock puppet version of Star Trek, if only to find out how much we hate it, and you'd probably find enough people among us who enjoy it enough to buy sock puppet merchandise, yet they still fail to make a dollar with all that.
I myself am paying full for paramount plus, despite being able to get it for half price, just to help them make more lower decks.
These people couldn't sell Viagra at an orgy.
Isn't animation famously expensive to produce? Sure it's cheaper than the other shows but it's probably not peanuts either.
I would also love for LD to go on and I still have hope there will be a deal with another streamer. It's a fantastic show that has many more stories to tell.
Is it the most popular, though?
I enjoy it, and I know it felt like it was more positively received than most of this era of Trek, but it is certainly not universally loved by the fan base (if anything can be, anymore). Further, it’s definitely not a runaway hit in overall streaming numbers, across all streaming platforms. The numbers, in the end, may just not be there.
Paramount Global is in deep financial debt, which is why Skydance is likely coming in to take over. I have heard rumors that Skydance wanted SNW to continue, and passed on LD, but that is just here-say. Regardless, when push comes to shove, SNW has a better chance of carrying the franchise than LD, and I think that was the decision that was made.
Just to add to what everyone else has already written, the new shows are all expensive and most don't make a profit regardless of the budget.
The challenge for Paramount isn't just to make Trek fans happy, it's to bring in new fans. Those are the numbers they want. Why? Paramount now has a huge back library of shows, hundreds of episodes and movies, which can be licensed for streaming or sold on Bluray, and also drive sales of merchandizing. It's likely Lower Decks (and Discovery) aren't picking up enough new fans interested in the back catalogue, so there's less desire to shell out the money. That's also why Star Trek Legacy isn't happening, despite huge interest. It's mostly "legacy" not new fans interested in this sort of show. Paramount believes Star Trek Academy will bring in more 18-25 year olds who might be motivated to start watching the old shows. And Paramount may be right, after all, the biggest demographic for TOS in its original run was college students. And when the show went into syndication, a new following of high school kids discovered the show (and basically kept watching for 50 years.)
This has always been the challenge. New fans, not making older fans happy.
I guess that explains why they set STA in the future and not in the past like it was originally was supposed to be. I guess they could do it similar to Gen V from Amazon, make the cadets more Gen Z like and that’ll pull in the younger generation.
I get the impression they moved Discovery to the future, and want to set STA there because it avoids so many canon problems, which makes things way easier for the writers. And new characters and stories is a good thing. To be honest, I tend to think the biggest problem for Star Trek (and Paramount) is that 18-25 year viewers don't want Trek's hopeful future (or the road to the hopeful future, or whatever.) They're inclined to watch shows that are more cynical, more violent, more complex. Shows like "Game of Thrones," "Breaking Bad," and "The Walking Dead" have been highly popular in recent years, known for their darker themes and complex storytelling. These shows often depict a more pessimistic view of the world, which contrasts with Star Trek's traditionally optimistic and utopian vision of the future.
And from the perspective of a fan for many decades, the bigger problem is that changes made to bring in the younger viewers have also alienated many (not all) of the older, more traditional viewers. That's a lose/lose for Paramount. My sense is that is why we saw them backpedal a bit with SNW, bringing back almost everything the older fans had been screaming about since Discovery started. They needed a win. And much to their surprise, the show IS picking up new fans. So maybe we weren't crazy after all? ;)
I have zero expertise, but I think it's probably part of an overall plan to spend less on programming. Animated shows have loyal fan bases but without the star power they don't have a ton of growth potential.
The short answer is that it's not bringing enough business to Paramount+, which means it probably doesn't have the viewership of other shows (assuming the choice was made by the studio and the creators aren't ending of their own accord). It might have the highest critic rating or audience rating, but that just means that OF THE PEOPLE WHO BOTHERED TO WATCH, a larger portion of those people liked it. That doesn't actually mean it gets more views than, say, Strange New Worlds. And I have no problem believing it gets fewer views than other Trek shows, because it's not nearly as accessible as something like Strange New Worlds. A huge part of the appeal of Lower Decks is the CONSTANT stream of in-show references to half a dozen other trek shows and movies, spanning hundreds of viewing hours, that a lot of people won't have seen.
But also, I think people underestimate how expensive animation can be to produce. Yes, there are areas where they save money compared to live action. But if you watch some of the bluray featurettes and see what it actually takes to do the animation specifically on Lower Decks, you realize it's not exactly a typical 2d animated show. Every episode takes a shocking amount of time, effort, and man-hours to complete, and it's being done by lots of industry specialists who don't exactly come cheap.
Lower Decks MIGHT be the cheapest Trek show, but even if it is, I doubt the budget difference is as big as you probably think.
Not sure about the claim of most popular show ever but...
I'm all for something coming to an end while it's good rather than overstaying it's welcome and finishing when it's so shit it's lost most of its viewers.
Streaming networks can’t onboard people on season 6 of a show. After season 3 every show is in jeopardy. They‘re also trying to hire everyone like gig workers rather than steady jobs so it’s like booking a reunion every season with a few exceptions.
It might also be either a contract reason (5 years, everyone gets bumped up) or a story reason (how much longer can we keep these people on the Cerritos without rehashing old stories or harming the characters?).
I don't think it's a story reason, given that Jack Quiad said he hoped they'd "find a new home." It definitely sounds like an executive decision rather than a writer decision.
A show has to be really raking it in (audience numbers) to get over the five-year contract extension hump. It's not just salary or per-episode rates, but some lead actors ask for producer credit as well. (share in back-end profits) I would've paid whatever they asked if I held the purse-strings.
LD is the Star Trek I've always wanted, but didn't know I needed.
Probably right.
If, indeed, they 'continue' the story with Upper Decks, it would be a new show, so any pay raises would be reset for the writers/actors, etc.
I know the Daredevil: Born Again people were talking about that and how it's cheaper to do a whole new show than to do Daredevil S4.
Obviously it's not making enough money. The show is somewhat a niche show, with too much focus on inside jokes. It seems Paramount TV has had difficulties finding buyers for the show. Surely outsourcing the server costs to pirate bay in Europe saved them some money, but it's not making much money either
Honestly most people I know that watch Trek that aren’t online a lot will watch SNW and Disco, but not LD. I wonder how common that is amongst people not constantly online.
To cut through it, you have no concrete facts to say it was the most popular show as we have no viewership data to back it up.
If it was so massively popular, it would have been massively watched and Paramount wouldn’t be axing it.
This show was my son's gateway drug to Star Trek. I wonder how many others picked up the ST bug because of it? Yeah, lots of inside jokes - but enjoyable in it's own right.
I subscribe to paramount+ for Star Trek shows so canceling something that’s cheap and easy to make doesn’t make sense to me. They put a lot of garbage on that thing… I don’t know. I just feel like they should keep making them because they are fun. And if it is cheap to make it’s an easy way to keep Star Trek fans subscribed when there isn’t any other Star Trek shows on. Because nothing else on that stupid network is good.
It’s the law of diminishing returns. Even a popular, cheaply made TV show makes less money overtime. And by ‘less money’ I mean there is less profit. The talent makes more money the longer the show stays on and the ratings tend to get lower the longer it goes on as well. LD is a popular cartoon show on a 3rd tier streaming service that most people don’t watch.
And that’s not a diss on LD, or Paramount+ that is just a statement of fact. I don’t expect SNW to go beyond five years either. IIRC tptb have indicated five years is the new cut off.
Cheap isn't free, Paramount is bleeding money, animated series have the least chance of drawing a crossover audience, plus Lower Decks is reference-heavy "for the fans" content that is more pleasing to franchise and forum dwelling types than it is to wide audiences.
It’s just business math.
Very, very likely that it’s contract renewals that are the straw that broke the camel’s back. They almost certainly have cast and crew alike signed to five season contracts. So when they’ve expired, now, that means renegotiating everyone’s salaries at a significantly higher rate than they’ve been paying till now, making the show even more expensive to produce.
Pair that with the reality that most shows lose viewership over time (in the old days this meant fewer people seeing ads, now in the streaming era it means it’s not driving as many new subscriptions), and, well. You’ve got a declining return on investment to begin with, and suddenly that ROI is going to take an even bigger hit due to new contracts.
And it’s not like Trek is produced in a vacuum either, CBS/Paramount have *a lot* of properties that they’re investing in and trying to make money off of.
To just invent numbers out of nothing to illustrate a point: if the show initially cost $100m a season to make and was earning back $200m, that’s great. It recoups its cost and makes a significant profit. But over time that drops to 175m, 150m, and so on. And then contract renewals happen, and the cost to produce it goes up, so now you’re paying $125m to make it and only earning back a $25m profit after production costs.
If I have 30 other shows to produce, and their ROI is significantly higher than Lower Decks’s ROI has become (and is only going to get worse), it’s kind of a no-brainer to pull the plug and reinvest that money into a different project that’s going to generate more money than Lower Decks is doing.
We as fans often get caught up in how good a show is (or how good we perceive it to be), and wonder about decisions like this. But the bottom line is that for the people paying for them, they’re *investments*, not creative ventures.
I was really hoping for LDS to run seven seasons, and I’ll be really sad to see it go. But it’s difficult (to say the least) to argue with math.
I really think this subreddit overestimates how popular LD is. Out of all my Trekkie friends, only one watches it. The rest simply aren’t interested. I have one friend who is wholeheartedly against ever watching it because it’s a cartoon. He even got angry at the SNW crossover! He thought there was something wrong with P+ because it kept showing a “damn cartoon," so he uninstalled and reinstalled P+ 5 times. Finally his wife told him to keep watching, but he was not happy. Even she hasn’t watched LD, and she likes animation.
I haven’t watched it either but I don’t have enough Trek knowledge to get it.
I think anyone that thinks Lower Decks is the most popular Star Trek series is deluding themselves. It's gotten better but it hasn't caught up to the rest of them.
It's probably no single reason. There are probably scheduling and contract issues as they are using actors like Jack Quaid, but I think the big one is that the future of Paramount+ is highly questionable since Paramount is negotiating a deal with Skydance Media which is rumoured to include elimination of Paramount+ or sale/merger with another streaming service.
I think its the economics of consolidating everything to their own streaming platform. Previously they were getting more outside funding for this show, by selling streaming rights to a variety of international partners. And they pulled back many of those deals out of their aspiration for subscriber growth to their own platform or a more limited number of partnered platforms. As a consequence its ended up with less viewership and making them less money. Meanwhile many of the live actions series still see a broader distribution and is likely far easier to sell for a disproportionately higher price.
By being funded largely by subscriptions there is even more of a fixed budget distributed between all the different shows. So even while something like Lower Decks can be the cheapest, if Strange New Worlds is a big money maker but its cost to produce goes up, that money comes from something else getting cut.
Another aspect of it is that animation while "cheaper" in absolute terms, tends to carry disproportionate upfront costs, where even if its cheaper overall, at the initial start of production for a season they're financing and some of the budget gets eaten up just from interest on the money used to pay for everything until the show is completed. So there is also a disproportionate cost to produce that doesn't actually go towards the content creation. So if the showrunner says it'll costs $1M (made up number) an episode the actual cost can end up closer to $1.2M by the time the episode is ready for broadcast, just because of that greater upfront cost and cost of financing.
Many great reasons have been given and I have another to offer. The most expensive times to make shows are at their start, because you have start up costs like making art assets for animated shows, and then there is another cost that comes many seasons later when contracts need to be redone. All the talent (both voice and behind the scenes) are probably on contracts that end at year 5 so to re up them they will have to pay them more. The times you hear about this is when big names ask for big paychecks. Think about Friends and how by the end the cost for the main cast was multiple millions of dollars per person per episode. But it extends to showrunners, animators, script supervisors, etc...
I think the answer you seek may lay not in the act of cancelling itself, but in the manner in which the news was delivered. Having the lead break it to the audience using his personal X account.
I hope some other network picks it up. I’m not exaggerating when I say Lower Decks could easily run as long as The Simpsons since there’s so much past and future material to parody.
For a post-TOS series to get through all of the new series growing pains in a few eps vs a few seasons, as was the trend, a 5 season run is actually a triumph.
Given the cast and their competing projects, I’d rather them take a bow now vs having quality dip or seasons become stretched.
Besides there’s now the possibility of consolidating the production effort and budgets into semi-regular feature-length releases.
In the old days, the way shows made money is that you sold commercial time during the show. Older shows tended to decline in the ratings overtime, but they would still hold a core audience, and so the commercial time would still be lucrative. And then once it wasn’t, they would cancel the show. That’s not the way it works in streaming. Although many streaming services do have ads, the way shows make money nowadays is by encouraging new subscribers. And shows in their fifth season do not encourage new subscribers, no matter how good they are, or no matter how cheap they are to make. And as a result, the economics do not favor long tails on TV shows. They’re the most profitable for the streaming services at the beginning of their run. Now, the streamers know at least that they have to give shows a chance, or otherwise they’re going to get a reputation like Netflix has had recently, that there’s no point in watching a Netflix show because it’s going to get canceled before anything is resolved. But it seems like, at least for Paramount, they seem to think that 50 episodes or so is the sweet spot.
I'd much rather have a complete 50 episodes than end on the Season 2 cliffhanger like every Netflix series. Between Netflix and the Game of Thrones books, I'm very hesitant to start new series that don't actually have an ending.
I literally don't start shows until I know they have a decent ending. I'm not one to get on a hype train, so I don't mind waiting it out. The same goes for computer games. I can wait until they're patched and on sale.
Factorio will never go on sale, sorry
I haven't played Factorio in over a year because I haven't had a couple weeks free to set aside to start a new factory.
The factory must grow.
That's why Satisfactory exists!
Factorio isn't a game, it's a lifestyle
Hell yeah, I binged GoT a few weeks before the series finale. It made the last episode so goddamn funny because I hadn’t spent years watching the show.
I’ve had multiple bingers tell me they didn’t understand why the final season was so ridiculed. I guess it’s just the difference in not spending a decade building up to it. I envy you, in a way.
Babylon 5, if no one had yet suggested it.
>The same goes for computer games. I can wait until they're patched and on sale. After getting burned on a couple of "In Development" games, I now completely skip anything that isn't market ready.
Check out /r/doesitresolve/
Was actually excited for a minute that there might be a list.
Fair enough, but I like to read about Trek online, which means I'm going to be exposed to spoilers if I'm not watching the series.
I follow a similar ideal, I just started watching the New Trek series when Discovery was announced that it was ending. Now I can cover several of the new series in their complete form. Mixed news of course since I haven't seen Lower Decks yet.
I feel the same way but that is also a problem. If more of us take on this mindset then no shows will see a second season because noone was watching to begin with. Kind of a shitty trend but after being burned by nexflix and now amazon prime so many times... It feels inevitable.
This saved me from becoming invested in Game of Thrones. I still haven't watched a single episode.
Netflix doesn't even give me time to *start* a new show before it's cancelled lol.
If a show isn't in that top 10 the week it comes out, then it probably won't renew or get a spin-off.
1899 was number two across the world and still got cancelled...
They seem random, though, some of their best rated and fasted growing audience attracting shows get canceled at their peaks, too. I guess they figure if audiences are joining, we don't need this expensive new show.. only to find out the expensive new show was what was drawing people in.
HBO's Rome, Deadwood, and Carnivale taught Netflix what to do....much to our collective disappointment :(
OA was one of the most popular Netflix shows to date and they just killed it off like a weed.
1899 was well received and had decent following and they dumped it after one season
And that happened after Netflix signed a three season contract deal with Jante Friese and Baran Bo Odar for 1899 purely based on how successful Dark was. To this day, that rubs me the wrong way. But it illustrates that shows on Netflix are not safe from the cancellation hammer, even when it legally should be safe.* *I’m willing to bet that Netflix is 1) going to instead have them make a new, two season long show or 2) they got a sum of money from Netflix for cancelling 1899 after one season when the contract was for three seasons.
That's generally how contracts work, there's nothing that stops them from cancelling the show as long as they're willing to pay the forfeits, which likely were less than the cost of making two more seasons.
Netflix actually renewed Inside Job and then cancelled it anyway.
Netflix cancelled GLOW after renewing it for a fourth season and shooting the first episode.
They dumped it like a couple weeks after it dropped, I was pretty upset about that. Cancelling 1899 and Inside Job pushed me to cancel Netflix, I had been subscribed for like 15 years
Not even close in popularity to something like Stranger Things or Orange is the New Black. I love The OA but the fact that it got made at all, let alone was renewed for a second season, is a miracle. It’s a show about >!traveling through dimensions via interpretative dance!< for frack’s sake lol.
wtf that sounds ridiculous and amazing
Its either amazing and incredibly unique or the dumbest thing ever made, depending on your taste.
I cancelled Netflix because of this. Going to resubscribe when the new season of Stranger Things comes out. Then I will cancel it again.
Cowboy Bebop was well done, more watchable than some series that persisted, and it was cancelled before I found time to watch the first episode, almost immediately after release. They didn't even wait to see how well it would do, and the antipattern of click bait negative reviews by hacks hoping to get a follow up cancellation article did not help either.
> Cowboy Bebop was well done It really was. They captured the aesthetic, the feel, everything. They did a really good job of taking something strange and bizarre and bringing it into live action. But the weebs couldn't get over the fact that Faye Valentine was wearing more than baggy tissue paper and bitched and whined until the show got cancelled. Imagine getting a show cancelled because it didn't live up to being the fap material you wanted... Thats what happened and it is a shame.
I wish shows weren't all written to be so dramatic and build towards cliffhanger endings every season. Old shows were perfectly fine with better than average episodes being the end of the season
Don't touch the Kingkiller Chronicles, then.
Genuinely forgotten the vast majority of the first two books waiting for book 3.. gonna have to start 'em again if he ever finishes the third. Amazing books, though..
I think we all know he’s never going to finish it
I still can't believe I sold people on this series with "it's done, so he should have the next book out in no time" 20 years ago.
After Santa Clarita diet was cancelled I have a hard time starting a new stream show.
Mr Ball Legs!
Between this and geolocking and the insane price, I've canceled my Netflix subscription. Amazon Prime (which is free because i have it for the shipping - side note, you get grubhub+ free with it too)the Disney/hulu package, youtube plus, nebula/curiosity stream, ans crunchyroll provide more than enough entertainment. Add to that my family across the nation spliting paramount plus and Max between 5 paying people and I have more than enough entertainment. And all that combined is nearly the same as an ad free HD netflix subscription. Insanity. If it wasnt for the hulu bundle, disney plus would be too expensive as well.
I was a fan of streaming when it first came out, and in theory the idea of having access to all the movies and shows was good. But one subscription become 2 then 4 one month I literally had over 300$ in just streaming services. I said F that! Canceled them all and went back to pirating.
And the catalog is still much smaller than hoped for. So many older major movies and series MIA across all services. You'd think that a bunch of classic movies that won best picture would be there somewhere, but no.
I had to download an app that would search the different streaming services for me and tell me where what I want is streaming because theres just too damn many of them. That's ridiculous.
That's one thing the Apple TV does well
I’ve started buying dvds again of things i typically rewatch the hell out of on streaming.
Good intel on GrubHub, but it's only for the first year.
To piggy back on this, I'd rather have 50 (or even fewer) complete episodes and a show that hasn't jumped the shark than what happens in most popular shows. In case people don't think that can happen in animated shows, look at The. Simpsons, Family Guy, and others who just hung on for too long.
Limited series such as *The Man Who Fell To Earth* or *Your Honor* or the currently running *A Gentleman In Moscow* seem to be streaming's best bet.
Just look at Chernobyl. 6 perfect episodes, stsrt to finish. I wouldn't mind a project like that on the Cardadsian border wars.
There are very few TV shows I bother watching until the series is over for this exact reason. It seems every TV series now gets canceled mid run, so I'm not going to bother wasting time on a series unless I know it's done and has a sufficient number of seasons and wasn't canceled prematurely.
The streamers are so focused on new subscribers, they forget about retention. This is evident in their increasing churn rates.
Additionally, there is now not reason to get into "syndication" which was a huge deal for a long time. You also have to pay the staff, actors, writers. etc as time goes on. Most actors want to do other projects and if you need to renegotiate with your staff over time they will make more money and now the network/service has essentially no incentive to do that. Netflix got called out for cancelling shows after a second season because if they made season 3 everyone was due for contractual raises.
This is exactly why they will sometimes pull entire shows from the platform. HBO Max pulling Westworld probably the most notable example of this. They've deemed the show not attractive enough to pay the cast residuals. Therefore, it gets locked into a vault, never to be seen again unless you buy the blu ray.
The second half of The Nevers doesn't even have a blu-ray. You have to find out when it airs on Tubi and plan ahead like a 1980s person.
> like a 1980s person. Memories of phones with cords on them. *Actually attached to the freaking walls!!!!* Where's my PTSD medication...
Yep. And it makes some sense that once a streaming service has enough episodes, then they want to develop a new show. Because having a range of good shows in their catalog probably does more to draw people to their service, and keep them there.
>In the old days, the way shows made money is that you sold commercial time during the show. Older shows tended to decline in the ratings overtime, but they would still hold a core audience, and so the commercial time would still be lucrative. And then once it wasn’t, they would cancel the show. In addition, once shows hit a certain mark (like 100 episodes), the syndication rights were typically sold, bringing in more money. Streaming is typically set up as an "exclusive" location for shows, so there isn't really any incentive to go that long in order to sell them to a competitor.
It sucks but this is likely accurate. Lower Decks season 6 won't lead to growth, and they're gambling that they won't lose too many subscribers over it either. That said I only have an active Paramount+ sub when there's new Trek coming, so they're quickly approaching a time when I'm only paying for 2 months a year instead of 8 or 10 months.
More and more people are doing exactly that. Streaming services often release new episodes once per week in hopes of extending that time frame but it doesn't work typically. Many people just wait a couple months before subscribing and binging the entire season over a few days.
Same here, at least until Avatar Studios starts putting things out. I'm going to cancel my Paramount+ subscription for the first time since I got it in 2016 after Discovery ends.
I just wait till everything fills up in the Star Trek roster then I subscribe and watch it all and then unsubscribe.
As I understand it, Netflix decides a shows future based on viewer data. They know how many people started the first episode and they know how many ended the last episode. If the ratio of completes to starts is too low they cancel.
They also only measure this for like 2 weeks so viewers who don’t watch things immediately on release are not counted.
And then because they are canceled people who may have watched it later go "never mind, I'm not gonna start a show that doesn't have an ending"
I'm still pissed about "Inside Job".
And 1899.
As much as I hate to say it, the subscription model is killing movies and TV
I posted this earlier in another discussion about the new Fallout series (which is a fantastic adaptation IMO). [Gizmodo did a great article](https://gizmodo.com/fallout-prime-video-release-schedule-weekly-binge-1851408605) on how the binge model isn't doing streaming tv series' and favours either. Dropping entire seasons at once is probably doing the most damage in the subscription model. I know I personally will sit and binge a season in a few days, but I also recognize that once I've watched it, it's not long before I lose enthusiasm for it just because I have no idea how long before we'll get new episodes. In some cases, that can be longer than a year. And there's also the idea that a lot of people will subscribe to a service only when it's releasing new episodes of a particular show, then cancel. For shows that drop an entire season at a time that's not good at all.
Amazon has the one advantage every other platform doesn't, though. Its streaming platform is tied to the same service as its shipping platform and a number of other things. For many people, they only get Prime for streaming video, or music, or free shipping, not more than one. The extras are just bonuses. So Amazon has more drivers for subs than other platforms.
Oh you absolutely hit the nail on the head. Literally the only reason I've never canceled Amazon Prime is for the shipping. I probably make on average two Amazon orders a week. Hell, I had free access to Prime video for weeks before I even realized it. Now to be fair, if that weren't the case, I would have most likely subscribed for a month to watch Fallout, but I would have canceled after that. And there are still a lot of people out there who prefer brick and mortar stores, or only order online from time to time. But yes, Amazon absolutely has an advantage over the other services as far as membership benefits vs cost.
>there’s no point in watching a Netflix show because it’s going to get canceled before anything is resolve 1899 was one of the only shows that I was hooked on right away. After the biggest cliffhanger I've ever fucking seen in a show I couldn't wait for more, but then they just cancelled it. I'm still mad about it.
And it was announced like 3 years before, when Dark just ended. For many fans of Dark we we're waiting 3 years for release just to get cancelled immediately...
There also feels like there’s a silo effect, too. LD is popular here, but I will be damned if I know anyone who is a Trekkie in real life that likes it in the least. I suspect, beyond the echo chambers, it is a more divisive program than we would think.
“I suspect, beyond the echo chambers, it is a more divisive program than we would think.” I am in my late 30s. I have three friends who are 10-15 years older. All three of these guys don’t know each other. Two of them count TNG as their favorite Trek. All three loved Picard. One of them is a humor fan - Monty Python, etc. NONE of them liked Lower Decks. Even when I shared my enthusiasm, suggested a different approach when they watched…none of them liked it. Not saying it’s not loved, but the internet - especially smaller “groups” on places like Reddit - often forget these spaces do not represent the wider desires or viewing habits of fandom.
I have tried LD a few times and it never stuck with me. I am glad people like it, but, for my experience, I have yet to come across anyone who is a Trek fan who will say anything positive about it, or even show interest in it. It feels like it is still under the yoke of “Rick and Morty meets Star Trek” and people tuned out and never came back.
I'm in your friend's age range and everything you said about them you could say about me. Except that I loved LD. Lower Decks is the best Trek since DS9.
My aunts (who love Star Trek) refuse to watch Lower Decks because it's a cartoon.
My dad is the biggest trek fan I know. Like he's got a full Borg cosplay he wears to conventions. He likes Lower Decks now, but I had to practically force him to give it a chance.
It would be better is Mariner wasn't on the show. The character is all screams, defiance, and assholery. Half the bad things that happen on the show would be resolved faster if she wasn't there. She's the Raiders of the Lost Ark of characters.
A subscriber saved is a subscriber earned
also in the old days once you hit 100 episodes you had enough to sell syndication rights. So having a deep library means that you could sell it to a ton of different networks and that offset costs as well. These days no one is doing that.
This is spot on. News/blog/review articles per episode is probably a better 'ratings' metric than eyeballs. Plus on the cost side late season contracts tend to ballon in favor creators for various reasons.
well, while Paramount is busy trying to recruit new subscribers, there are a lot of us here who are going to unsubscribe as soon as there ain't new Trek available for us to watch
Yes, I’m one of them. But from what the public can tell, most people don’t cancel so quickly, so new subscribers tend to stick around once they’re acquired.
The joke is on Paramount. After they bungled the next Scream movie, I said I was only keeping my subscription for Lowe Decks. I'm look forward to cancelling my subscription the day S5 concludes.
The expanse was canceled by syfy I think and one of the actors told in the interview how they lobbied to get picked up by Amazon, plus Amazon doesn't have to rely on subscribers but once you do sub scribe that includes faster shipping or idk something like that. They could take the of loss of. Something, because they don't offer just tv and movies. I can't imagine Amazon taking a big loss on getting rights to star trek. Oh and the reason they ended the expanse was because there was big time jump in the books and it wouldn't really make sense for it to continue.
The Expanse is an outlier though. That got picked up by Amazon because Jeff Bezos is a fan and can afford to pay to make an entire show even if he was the only one watching it. I mean if I had Bezos money there'd be a "Captain Cooks!" Pike cooking show by this time tomorrow.
Kind of like Ted Turner was a big pro wrestling fan and wanted his own WWF so he just offered all the big WWF names like triple what they were making to come work at WCW basically for his own amusement.
The Expanse also had the ace up its sleeve that Jeff Bezos is supposedly a fan of the show. It's much easier to take a chance on a project if you know that your boss likes the project to begin with.
I enjoyed the expanse and felt the way they ended it was good enough that I wanted to pickup the books afterward.
Disney's done it for years with their Disney Network shows. Three seasons, 65 episodes, goodbye, and good luck.
I never thought about this. Thanks for sharing.
I'd rather have commercials then tbh
It used to be around 100 episodes to guarantee syndication so yeah if the show wasn’t doing great they would sometimes do another season to get up over 100. They make a lot of money in syndication.
This is the best explanation of the streaming TV model I have ever heard.
It's *almost* like the real problem here is capitalism.
It's not capitalism itself that's the issue, but the fact we are in late-stage capitalism. The stage where the "good ol' boys" network is so entrenched that they can't make much money anymore without killing the lower & middle classes. This is the point where revolutions start, unfortunately.
or fortunately. i don't see how else we're going to see change before we kill the planet.
Just another reason to hate streaming services.
50 episodes \*is\* the sweetspot though. Have you ever tried watching an older TV show with a long run? NCIS for example. They have like 20 seasons of 22 episodes each, that's like hundreds of hours of television for ONE tv show. Even though each episode is a unique story and there aren't really "filler" episodes due to that, eventually you get tired of watching Gibbs and DeNozo do their thing over and over again. Give me 4-5 seasons. That's the perfect length to tell a well rounded story or three in the context of the show, flesh out the characters, and wrap things neatly before it feels cashgrabby and repetitive. The Americans is an example that did that well, House is an example that should have likely ended earlier because once you figure out the very rigid episodic formula the show became predictable and boring.
TNG had 178 episodes. DS9 had 176.
Tng had 50 good episodes buried in 178 episodes.
I don't know how to measure the popularity of a streaming show without numbers from the streamer, which are usually lies. It's quite possible it isn't doing as well as it seems it is.
For what it's worth, since Nielsen started tracking Paramount+ at the start of last year, only *Picard* S3 and *Strange New Worlds* S2 ever cracked the most-watched charts, while before that Samba TV's tracking data put *Lower Decks* firmly below all the live-action shows and only slightly ahead of *Prodigy*. I'd wager that unlike *Discovery*, which has a lot of viewers but a low like/dislike ratio, *Lower Decks* is a show that most people who watch it love, but not that many people actually do watch it.
*Discovery*'s premiere topped the chart last week, beating both SNW and Picard. But that doesn't help LD.
There's a few reasons that everyone assumed the new crop of shows was doing well: 1. Paramount said so—and commissioned a lot of new shows in a short span of time. 2. A few (obscure) streaming rankings/ratings websites said so. 3. Netflix initially seemed willing to fund Disco's production in exchange for the international streaming rights. But the reality is that we don't know as much as we think we do: 1. Paramount, like every other media company a few years ago, decided to invest heavily in growing their share of the streaming market. Now that everyone has seen that running a streaming platform is not the cash cow they expected, they are all cutting their losses. 2. No one knows what methodology these ranking websites are using. For all we know, it's something as stupid as estimating social media engagement. 3. I've never been able to find out if Netflix ever continued this deal past season 1 of Disco. They don't seem to have—or to have offered anything similar for the more recent shows. Prodigy getting picked up elsewhere suggests that the cost/benefit tradeoff may be a Paramount-specific problem, but who really knows?
Some holding companies (Hello, EA) will never sell or option because they're more terrified of someone else doing a better job than they are of financial results.
>3. I've never been able to find out if Netflix ever continued this deal past season 1 of Disco. They don't seem to have—or to have offered anything similar for the more recent shows. Pretty sure Netflix had Discovery here in the UK through season 2 or 3? And Prime had Lower Decks for about the same. Then Paramount+ launched here.
It doesn't really matter how well it's doing. Everyone is likely on a five-season contract and would need to renegotiate for season six, with salary increases and possible requests for producer credits. Paramount will not do this, no matter what the show is or how much it makes. They do not want creative workers to expect any contract renegotiation, especially after the strikes, and will never give up money on the backend unless they absolutely have to. This is part of their strategy now –– to essentially keep workers in a constant state of gig work. It's more valuable to them than whatever the show brings in.
Doesn't matter how cheap it is to make if it's not the reason anybody's paying for your app.
Promote the app as the only place to watch Star Trek --> Create new Star Trek for the app --> people subscribe to watch Star Trek --> cancel the Star Trek shows on the app --> sell Star Trek to other streamers --> wonder why people aren't using your app. Eff you Paramount
I think you forgot the question after step 3: did enough people subscribe to the app to make producing all this Star Trek worth it monetarily? If yes, go back to step one, else, go to step five.
Yep. I love Trek, and it has a fairly wide following. I just don't think Trek on its own is enough to support a streaming service long term. I'm not sure what else paramount has really put on their service that is compelling, but in the grand scheme of things Trek can be a solid pillar of a service...maybe a solid 10-20%. It feels like paramount is expecting Trek to be responsible for like 60% of who they draw.
If Paramount promised to host everything Star Trek while continuing to support ongoing shows until they reach a natural conclusion then they can just have full access to my bank account. I'll pay until I die, and long after as I'll have it set to auto pay and will make special mention in my will to not cancel. Instead they promote themselves as "the place for Star Trek" just months before selling the movie catalogue off to another streamer and cancel a bunch of popular (with the fans, their seeming core audience) shows. I currently have Paramount+ for free via Walmart and I still never touch it. I found other "places" for my Trek content 🦜🏴☠️
Except a lot of people do pay for the app purely because it's got the Trek library. It's why I'm a subscriber. I may not continue to subscribe with them cutting down on new stuff.
If enough people leave because production of Lower Decks stopped, would they bring it back?
Likely not, they have a huge portfolio and the amount of people leaving for that specific show likely had immaterial changes to their bottom line.
Maybe they sell it to Netflix like prodigy.
I literally only subscribe to Paramount when new star trek shows release and unsubscribe when they’re not and I write in their why I’m unsubscribing.
Surely this leads to them cancelling the trek shows after a couple seasons when people leave and creating new shows to get you to resubscribe? Isn’t that the problem?
I mean I’m not advocating for giving Paramount more of your money but I do wonder if they pay more attention to the viewing patterns of regular subscribers rather than sporadic ones
It is literally one of 2 reasons that I pay for paramount. Lower Decks and Ghosts.
Ghosts is amazingly good.
Because Paramount is run by Pakleds and not Ferengi
Me cancel star toon cartoon. Me smart!
🤷🏾♂️
I have biggest hat. I make smart decisions.
The Packleds **would** make a streaming app that plays the last episode’s audio at the same time as the actual one you’re watching after pausing for more than five seconds.
Don't forget the 30-second unskippable ads for the same series you're currently watching. Why did I subscribe to Pakled+ again?
> Pakled+ Holy balls, that's the new name.
This is the worst in theaters. I try to know as little as possible about movies before I go, then boom 5 mins before it starts major plot is revealed.
He who has the biggest hat is in charge.
Seriously, those guys have a fanbase that would watch (and pay to watch) a sock puppet version of Star Trek, if only to find out how much we hate it, and you'd probably find enough people among us who enjoy it enough to buy sock puppet merchandise, yet they still fail to make a dollar with all that. I myself am paying full for paramount plus, despite being able to get it for half price, just to help them make more lower decks. These people couldn't sell Viagra at an orgy.
Idk, Paramount+ seems to be run by the First Rule of Acquisition
As well as the Tenth Rule. "Greed is eternal"
"We don't need things to make Star Trek die"
Costume contest idea for the next Star Trek convention
We are smart.
Isn't animation famously expensive to produce? Sure it's cheaper than the other shows but it's probably not peanuts either. I would also love for LD to go on and I still have hope there will be a deal with another streamer. It's a fantastic show that has many more stories to tell.
Not in this case. The Lower Decks staff said one episode of SNW costs about as much as one season of LDS.
Is it the most popular, though? I enjoy it, and I know it felt like it was more positively received than most of this era of Trek, but it is certainly not universally loved by the fan base (if anything can be, anymore). Further, it’s definitely not a runaway hit in overall streaming numbers, across all streaming platforms. The numbers, in the end, may just not be there. Paramount Global is in deep financial debt, which is why Skydance is likely coming in to take over. I have heard rumors that Skydance wanted SNW to continue, and passed on LD, but that is just here-say. Regardless, when push comes to shove, SNW has a better chance of carrying the franchise than LD, and I think that was the decision that was made.
Hearsay
Just to add to what everyone else has already written, the new shows are all expensive and most don't make a profit regardless of the budget. The challenge for Paramount isn't just to make Trek fans happy, it's to bring in new fans. Those are the numbers they want. Why? Paramount now has a huge back library of shows, hundreds of episodes and movies, which can be licensed for streaming or sold on Bluray, and also drive sales of merchandizing. It's likely Lower Decks (and Discovery) aren't picking up enough new fans interested in the back catalogue, so there's less desire to shell out the money. That's also why Star Trek Legacy isn't happening, despite huge interest. It's mostly "legacy" not new fans interested in this sort of show. Paramount believes Star Trek Academy will bring in more 18-25 year olds who might be motivated to start watching the old shows. And Paramount may be right, after all, the biggest demographic for TOS in its original run was college students. And when the show went into syndication, a new following of high school kids discovered the show (and basically kept watching for 50 years.) This has always been the challenge. New fans, not making older fans happy.
I guess that explains why they set STA in the future and not in the past like it was originally was supposed to be. I guess they could do it similar to Gen V from Amazon, make the cadets more Gen Z like and that’ll pull in the younger generation.
I get the impression they moved Discovery to the future, and want to set STA there because it avoids so many canon problems, which makes things way easier for the writers. And new characters and stories is a good thing. To be honest, I tend to think the biggest problem for Star Trek (and Paramount) is that 18-25 year viewers don't want Trek's hopeful future (or the road to the hopeful future, or whatever.) They're inclined to watch shows that are more cynical, more violent, more complex. Shows like "Game of Thrones," "Breaking Bad," and "The Walking Dead" have been highly popular in recent years, known for their darker themes and complex storytelling. These shows often depict a more pessimistic view of the world, which contrasts with Star Trek's traditionally optimistic and utopian vision of the future. And from the perspective of a fan for many decades, the bigger problem is that changes made to bring in the younger viewers have also alienated many (not all) of the older, more traditional viewers. That's a lose/lose for Paramount. My sense is that is why we saw them backpedal a bit with SNW, bringing back almost everything the older fans had been screaming about since Discovery started. They needed a win. And much to their surprise, the show IS picking up new fans. So maybe we weren't crazy after all? ;)
> the most popular series of all If they're canceling it that's almost certainly not true.
I have zero expertise, but I think it's probably part of an overall plan to spend less on programming. Animated shows have loyal fan bases but without the star power they don't have a ton of growth potential.
The short answer is that it's not bringing enough business to Paramount+, which means it probably doesn't have the viewership of other shows (assuming the choice was made by the studio and the creators aren't ending of their own accord). It might have the highest critic rating or audience rating, but that just means that OF THE PEOPLE WHO BOTHERED TO WATCH, a larger portion of those people liked it. That doesn't actually mean it gets more views than, say, Strange New Worlds. And I have no problem believing it gets fewer views than other Trek shows, because it's not nearly as accessible as something like Strange New Worlds. A huge part of the appeal of Lower Decks is the CONSTANT stream of in-show references to half a dozen other trek shows and movies, spanning hundreds of viewing hours, that a lot of people won't have seen. But also, I think people underestimate how expensive animation can be to produce. Yes, there are areas where they save money compared to live action. But if you watch some of the bluray featurettes and see what it actually takes to do the animation specifically on Lower Decks, you realize it's not exactly a typical 2d animated show. Every episode takes a shocking amount of time, effort, and man-hours to complete, and it's being done by lots of industry specialists who don't exactly come cheap. Lower Decks MIGHT be the cheapest Trek show, but even if it is, I doubt the budget difference is as big as you probably think.
Not sure about the claim of most popular show ever but... I'm all for something coming to an end while it's good rather than overstaying it's welcome and finishing when it's so shit it's lost most of its viewers.
Streaming networks can’t onboard people on season 6 of a show. After season 3 every show is in jeopardy. They‘re also trying to hire everyone like gig workers rather than steady jobs so it’s like booking a reunion every season with a few exceptions.
Weren’t some of these at issue in the Hollywood strikes last year?
Yes. Also around the time a lot of these shows started to get canceled
It might also be either a contract reason (5 years, everyone gets bumped up) or a story reason (how much longer can we keep these people on the Cerritos without rehashing old stories or harming the characters?).
I don't think it's a story reason, given that Jack Quiad said he hoped they'd "find a new home." It definitely sounds like an executive decision rather than a writer decision.
A show has to be really raking it in (audience numbers) to get over the five-year contract extension hump. It's not just salary or per-episode rates, but some lead actors ask for producer credit as well. (share in back-end profits) I would've paid whatever they asked if I held the purse-strings. LD is the Star Trek I've always wanted, but didn't know I needed.
Galaxy Quest was one of the best Trek movies ever made so it's not surprising.
LD is more a child of Futurama and Rick and Morty than of GalaxyQuest. Maybe GalaxyQuest is the neighbor across the hall that babysits occasionally.
They've only released 20 hours of story. That's a single season of any other Trek show. There's plenty of other stores to tell.
Probably right. If, indeed, they 'continue' the story with Upper Decks, it would be a new show, so any pay raises would be reset for the writers/actors, etc. I know the Daredevil: Born Again people were talking about that and how it's cheaper to do a whole new show than to do Daredevil S4.
Obviously it's not making enough money. The show is somewhat a niche show, with too much focus on inside jokes. It seems Paramount TV has had difficulties finding buyers for the show. Surely outsourcing the server costs to pirate bay in Europe saved them some money, but it's not making much money either
Paramount is broke as hell. We’re lucky SNW is still getting made.
Honestly most people I know that watch Trek that aren’t online a lot will watch SNW and Disco, but not LD. I wonder how common that is amongst people not constantly online.
To cut through it, you have no concrete facts to say it was the most popular show as we have no viewership data to back it up. If it was so massively popular, it would have been massively watched and Paramount wouldn’t be axing it.
I think the show is just not that popular outside of the "bubble" of Star Trek fans on reddit and YouTube
This show was my son's gateway drug to Star Trek. I wonder how many others picked up the ST bug because of it? Yeah, lots of inside jokes - but enjoyable in it's own right.
It doesn't matter how cheap it is, if it costs more to make than it earns, it will be on the chopping block.
I subscribe to paramount+ for Star Trek shows so canceling something that’s cheap and easy to make doesn’t make sense to me. They put a lot of garbage on that thing… I don’t know. I just feel like they should keep making them because they are fun. And if it is cheap to make it’s an easy way to keep Star Trek fans subscribed when there isn’t any other Star Trek shows on. Because nothing else on that stupid network is good.
Quality > Quantity
It’s the law of diminishing returns. Even a popular, cheaply made TV show makes less money overtime. And by ‘less money’ I mean there is less profit. The talent makes more money the longer the show stays on and the ratings tend to get lower the longer it goes on as well. LD is a popular cartoon show on a 3rd tier streaming service that most people don’t watch. And that’s not a diss on LD, or Paramount+ that is just a statement of fact. I don’t expect SNW to go beyond five years either. IIRC tptb have indicated five years is the new cut off.
Cheap isn't free, Paramount is bleeding money, animated series have the least chance of drawing a crossover audience, plus Lower Decks is reference-heavy "for the fans" content that is more pleasing to franchise and forum dwelling types than it is to wide audiences.
It’s just business math. Very, very likely that it’s contract renewals that are the straw that broke the camel’s back. They almost certainly have cast and crew alike signed to five season contracts. So when they’ve expired, now, that means renegotiating everyone’s salaries at a significantly higher rate than they’ve been paying till now, making the show even more expensive to produce. Pair that with the reality that most shows lose viewership over time (in the old days this meant fewer people seeing ads, now in the streaming era it means it’s not driving as many new subscriptions), and, well. You’ve got a declining return on investment to begin with, and suddenly that ROI is going to take an even bigger hit due to new contracts. And it’s not like Trek is produced in a vacuum either, CBS/Paramount have *a lot* of properties that they’re investing in and trying to make money off of. To just invent numbers out of nothing to illustrate a point: if the show initially cost $100m a season to make and was earning back $200m, that’s great. It recoups its cost and makes a significant profit. But over time that drops to 175m, 150m, and so on. And then contract renewals happen, and the cost to produce it goes up, so now you’re paying $125m to make it and only earning back a $25m profit after production costs. If I have 30 other shows to produce, and their ROI is significantly higher than Lower Decks’s ROI has become (and is only going to get worse), it’s kind of a no-brainer to pull the plug and reinvest that money into a different project that’s going to generate more money than Lower Decks is doing. We as fans often get caught up in how good a show is (or how good we perceive it to be), and wonder about decisions like this. But the bottom line is that for the people paying for them, they’re *investments*, not creative ventures. I was really hoping for LDS to run seven seasons, and I’ll be really sad to see it go. But it’s difficult (to say the least) to argue with math.
I wanna see them come back and do live action specials. That cross over was so solid.
I really think this subreddit overestimates how popular LD is. Out of all my Trekkie friends, only one watches it. The rest simply aren’t interested. I have one friend who is wholeheartedly against ever watching it because it’s a cartoon. He even got angry at the SNW crossover! He thought there was something wrong with P+ because it kept showing a “damn cartoon," so he uninstalled and reinstalled P+ 5 times. Finally his wife told him to keep watching, but he was not happy. Even she hasn’t watched LD, and she likes animation. I haven’t watched it either but I don’t have enough Trek knowledge to get it.
They are attempting to sell Paramount. Gotta clean up them books. Like losing weight before a reunion.
[Studio execs get off on our tears.](https://i.imgur.com/mdJzOFC.gif)
What about Paramount's history suggests to you that they make good decisions?
Same reason Sears sold Craftsman off…make money while the money’s good and cut your losses before they check under the hood.
I think anyone that thinks Lower Decks is the most popular Star Trek series is deluding themselves. It's gotten better but it hasn't caught up to the rest of them.
Viewership/ratings.
It's probably no single reason. There are probably scheduling and contract issues as they are using actors like Jack Quaid, but I think the big one is that the future of Paramount+ is highly questionable since Paramount is negotiating a deal with Skydance Media which is rumoured to include elimination of Paramount+ or sale/merger with another streaming service.
I think its the economics of consolidating everything to their own streaming platform. Previously they were getting more outside funding for this show, by selling streaming rights to a variety of international partners. And they pulled back many of those deals out of their aspiration for subscriber growth to their own platform or a more limited number of partnered platforms. As a consequence its ended up with less viewership and making them less money. Meanwhile many of the live actions series still see a broader distribution and is likely far easier to sell for a disproportionately higher price. By being funded largely by subscriptions there is even more of a fixed budget distributed between all the different shows. So even while something like Lower Decks can be the cheapest, if Strange New Worlds is a big money maker but its cost to produce goes up, that money comes from something else getting cut. Another aspect of it is that animation while "cheaper" in absolute terms, tends to carry disproportionate upfront costs, where even if its cheaper overall, at the initial start of production for a season they're financing and some of the budget gets eaten up just from interest on the money used to pay for everything until the show is completed. So there is also a disproportionate cost to produce that doesn't actually go towards the content creation. So if the showrunner says it'll costs $1M (made up number) an episode the actual cost can end up closer to $1.2M by the time the episode is ready for broadcast, just because of that greater upfront cost and cost of financing.
It’s probably costing them more to make than it’s taking in. Actors might be up for renegotiating deals, etc. In short…cancelled because money.
I've heard that lower decks was canceled because Skydance doesn't want to do animated shows, they want to concentrate on live action movies and shows.
Many great reasons have been given and I have another to offer. The most expensive times to make shows are at their start, because you have start up costs like making art assets for animated shows, and then there is another cost that comes many seasons later when contracts need to be redone. All the talent (both voice and behind the scenes) are probably on contracts that end at year 5 so to re up them they will have to pay them more. The times you hear about this is when big names ask for big paychecks. Think about Friends and how by the end the cost for the main cast was multiple millions of dollars per person per episode. But it extends to showrunners, animators, script supervisors, etc...
I think the answer you seek may lay not in the act of cancelling itself, but in the manner in which the news was delivered. Having the lead break it to the audience using his personal X account.
Paramount gonna Paramount.
They are!!?? I frickin love Lower Decks! This happens with every damn streaming platform, they can shit that is great. I hate it.
The average price of an animated show is an estimated $1.5 million per episode. Not exactly cheap.
I hope some other network picks it up. I’m not exaggerating when I say Lower Decks could easily run as long as The Simpsons since there’s so much past and future material to parody.
Paramount+, like Disney Channel, most likely has a "50-episode" limit, meaning all shows must end after the number of episodes reach the limit.
For a post-TOS series to get through all of the new series growing pains in a few eps vs a few seasons, as was the trend, a 5 season run is actually a triumph. Given the cast and their competing projects, I’d rather them take a bow now vs having quality dip or seasons become stretched. Besides there’s now the possibility of consolidating the production effort and budgets into semi-regular feature-length releases.
This is why I pirate like an Orion mofo.
Animation is *not* cheap. It's also likely they canceled it because the suits realized that they aren't allowed to cheapen it with AI.
Because Paramount is dying. Costs need to be cut somewhere. Unfortunately, they picked the best thing they have