Netflix has a problem: No one is watching the second seasons of its biggest hits. This isn’t a new trend, but it is now becoming a dire one, with executives at the company scrambling around asking what happened and looking for new shows—new content—to fix it. But content is not Netflix’s problem, and if its execs actually used the service they operate they’d have a better idea of what happened. Because there is no one to blame but Netflix itself.
The drop-offs have been bad. Beef and One Piece both lost over half their audiences in their respective second seasons. Same with Running Point and Four Seasons. Now Avatar: The Last Airbender is dealing with a similar drop off a cliff. The decline could be attributed to some of these shows being deeply mediocre and audiences recognizing that mediocrity. I know at least two are on my “I’ll watch when I get around to it” list. The real reason is rooted in what Netflix is: a technology company.
I know it’s one of Hollywood’s biggest players. I know it has Oscars and Emmys and plenty of exclusive deals with enormous stars. It even hosts film premieres in movie theaters! But Netflix mainly does that because it’s required for awards eligibility. It doesn’t operate as an entertainment company. Doesn’t think like one. Like any good tech company, Netflix’s culture and philosophy are focused on the data and the rest is just details to be sorted out by someone with less power and stock options.
Consequently no one is really prioritizing entertainment. You need real people who understand other real people to create the kind of cultural impact of big successful shows, not just execs who ask for more rehashes of the plot because data analysis told them to. Netflix lacks an Irving Thalberg or Richard Plepler or Bob Greenblatt instinctively knowing what will and will not resonate with people. Those guys built entertainment empires and decades later what they produced is still in the public’s consciousness. Greenblatt ushered in the golden age of Showtime programming. Plepler greenlit The Sopranos and Game Of Thrones. Thalberg created a host of stars including Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford. Netflix has given us Bridgerton and Millie Bobby Brown.
Netflix’s religious adherence to the data is why there’s so many mediocre shows (usually with multiple years between seasons) and why we have batch drops instead of a weekly schedule. The batch drops are apparently great for subscriber retention—providing big gluts of new content every weekend for a lazy viewer just looking to be entertained. They’re also wonderful for those of us who make a day of a TV show binge, but we are a rarer breed than Netflix (or I) might assume. Because Netflix dumps shows in batches, it’s become really hard to build natural buzz the way HBO is still managing to do under David Zaslav. Consequently, if you don’t regularly log into Netflix you might not even know a show’s new season is out and worth a watch; and if, as in the case of Stranger Things, the finale is a real stinker, then people might just elect to skip all together.
Only they need to know the new season even exists. Netflix has a habit of underpromoting the later seasons of shows like Running Point and Four Seasons. A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder is a terrific example because Netflix wasn’t the only company handling distribution and production. The first season was a massive hit for Netflix in 2024. The second season was praised for the improvement in quality, but, by some counts, had a 75-percent decline in viewers on Netflix. It had no problem becoming a hit in the U.K., where the BBC handled promotion and distribution and happily announced that the third season was coming and had already been filmed. While that could be because it’s a British show, it could also be because most Americans and people in other nations just had few clues there was a new season worth watching. Its time in Netflix’s “Top 10” carousel was limited, and if you missed it because you were, say, bingeing all of Invincible on Prime Video and not even opening Netflix for a couple of weeks, then you might have missed the new season entirely.
That’s almost always the case with Netflix and me nowadays. I can binge a show three times and give it two thumbs up on Netflix and still have to manually search for the new season because the algorithm would rather suggest a bunch of shows for literal babies because I watched She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power a couple of times six years ago.
Netflix’s recommendation engine used to be its biggest strength. That’s what set it apart from the other streamers with their larger libraries of IP and more diverse offerings. Now it’s a common complaint I hear about both from my friends with multiple TV boxsets and from my friends who get their entertainment news exclusively from Instagram.
The sloppy algorithm wouldn’t be an issue if Netflix was better at building buzz or big pop culture hits. It does a lot of things right enough that there shouldn’t be a problem and it’s big enough now that it is still printing money via subscriptions and advertisements. But being a tech company in the entertainment field has its limits. Data and money are not the solution to all problems. The AI renaissance is reminding the finance world of that fact, and even the co-founder of the AI giant Anthropic has expounded on the necessity for humanities education in the world of technology.
Netflix is now a prime example of what happens when you get so focused on being Big Tech that you forget all the other stuff Hollywood has spent a century learning. I have a sneaking suspicion more people can explain to you what “Netflix and chill” means than tell you their favorite Netflix show. Netflix was an app first—a piece of technology that served as a portal to a wider world of entertainment. If it wants to be more than a portal, then it needs to take a long hard look at itself and ask what’s more important: being a technology company or an entertainment one?
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