It feels insane for streaming services to be cancelling shows like Our Flag Means Death in this era
It feels insane for streaming services to be cancelling shows like Our Flag Means Death in this era
In this era of peak streaming saturation, why are they shooting themselves in the dick with a pirate gun or whatever?
Max has announced today that queer-favourite pirate romance comedy Our Flag Means Death has been cancelled after its second season, leaving fans feeling extremely keel-hauled (that’s a bad thing that pirates do to you).
The cancellation comes off the back of a whole world of recent streaming cancellations, with so many over 2024 it’s not even worth even trying to list them all. We’ve gone through that period of rapid expansion, where every new streaming service was shelling out money for “content”, and we’re now in the contraction period, with shows being cancelled left and right. The next step will be the streaming services themselves shutting down or being absorbed by others - even Paramount+ has started licensing their shows to other streamers, which is going to keep everything nice and confusing.
“While Max will not be moving forward with a third season of Our Flag Means Death, we are so proud of the joyous, hilarious, and heartfelt stories that creator David Jenkins, Taika Waititi, Rhys Darby, Garrett Basch, Dan Halsted, Adam Stein, Antoine Douaihy, and the entire superb cast and crew brought to life,” a spokesperson for Max told The Hollywood Reporter. “We also thank the dedicated fans who embraced these stories and built a gorgeous, inclusive community surrounding the show.”
It’s interesting that they acknowledged the fans directly, because it’s in them that my sincere confusion lies - why is a streaming service in 2024 completely ignoring how important they are?
As Them reported last year, the community around Our Flag Means Death went insane online, going overboard (pirate pun) with fan art, internet fiction, and unofficial merchandise. They also note that Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard were one of the ten most popular “ships” on fanfic site Archive of Our Own last year (another pirate pun).
It’s also worth pointing out that the show was a big critical success too - but this show, and other recently cancelled shows like Shadow and Bone or Warrior Nun, can be defined by their fervent fandoms. It’s also no surprise that many of these shows have huge queer fanbases.
Fandoms are intensely powerful right now, and while I argue passionately that show writers need to stop pandering to fandoms and sacrificing narrative integrity, I do believe that streaming services should be valuing what fandoms bring to them.
They bring engaged and returning viewers.
With dozens of streaming services scrapping for subscribers, surely they’d be fighting to retain fans, who by their very nature are willing to spend money on the shows they love. Most people I know currently employ a window-shopping attitude to streaming services - if there’s a particular show they want to watch, they’ll sign up for a trial at Netflix or Binge or Max or whatever, and then usually let it lapse. Streaming loyalty is replaced by show interest - or at best, laziness. My parents, for example, haven’t shut off their Stan subscription because they forget they had it. (They also haven’t shut off their Prime Video subscription because “we just never seem to get a bill” - reader, they were logged into mine).
Surely, with casual viewers abound, it’s worth their while to work on retaining fandoms. Surely, even if the show isn’t getting Succession or Game of Thrones or Brooklyn 99 level audience numbers, the fact that they can rely on that audience coming back for a third season means more than high numbers of casual viewers. The idea that someone might hold on to a yearly subscription to wait for the anticipated next season of their favourite show isn’t just wishful thinking - it’s the core of subscription models.
Retention or subscriber models is all about bringing someone in and working to make them stay - if they’re sticking around for a third season of OFMD, then surely they’re going to be looking around for other shows to watch. Surely they can flip loyalty to a show into at least financial loyalty to the subscription service?
I’m aware that there’s more going on with streamers and their precious money - the fact that Australia’s Wellmania on Netflix had objectively good numbers but still wasn’t renewed for a second season, shows that there is business logic going on that I don’t understand, or don’t want to understand. But I think it’s pretty clear that like pirates, they are proceeds motivated - they want that bullion (pirate reference).
But I also entirely believe that “business reasons” like this usually come at the expense of the art, and the audience. The fact that we’re in a world where Disney+ is removing cancelled shows from their platform, and subsequently making them impossible to watch at all, shows us that these services do not give a flying shit about the “content” they host or their viewers who they milk for money. These are shows that people love and have put years of work into, lost into the digital void, potentially forever. I read an interesting article recently about how tens of thousands of early films were lost in a similar way when we moved from one kind of reel technology to another.
The model has shifted, and while streaming services are chasing big numbers, it seems to me that providing constancy and loyalty to your subscribers is going to be more important in the long run for these services. And how to prove constancy and loyalty to fickle viewers, spoiled by choice of streamers, bamboozled by an excess of shows?
Well, you could start by not cancelling shows with proven, dedicated, and loyal fanbases.
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I think Disney is a separate thing tho, since they’ve always pursued an “unavailability” business model. Back when videos were the home media, if you didn’t buy a movie when it released, your only option was to rent it, maybe score a second hand copy from an op shop. There was no Second Print Run. Having it all available at all times is the weird thing for them. As for the loss of Our Flag, i got no words. Feels like peak Hetero Nonsense.