Netflix CEOs say they’ve ‘never canceled a successful show’ amid wave of cancellations

Recent cancellations that sparked mourning and frustration on social media include the acclaimed fantasy drama Warrior Nun, animated sitcom Inside Job, German period sci-fi 1899, and horror series Resident Evil, loosely adapted from the video game series, among others. Sarandos has maintained that Netflix has “never canceled a successful show.”

“A lot of these shows were well-intended but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget,” he recently told Bloomberg. “The key to it is you have to be able to talk to a small audience on a small budget and a large audience at a large budget. If you do that well, you can do that forever.” Sarandos later pointed to the success of South Korean hit Squid Game as an example.

“It is very rare that a show like Squid Game from Korea would be as global as it was,” he said. “Within 30 hours, the world was watching Squid Game with no human intervention to try to market Squid Game to the world.”

Peters added, “We’re just getting started to make Squid Game not an unusual thing, but basically something that happens literally every week.”

Sarandos hailed Netflix as “equal parts HBO, AMC, FX, the Food Network, HGTV, Comedy Central, and Lifetime.”

“You used to have to hunt through 500 channels of cable to find them all and now they’re gonna be on Netflix,” Sarandos said. “The measure of quality is, if you love a dating show, make it as good as The Ultimatum, make it as good as Love is Blind. There’s no difference in prestige quality television in each of these genres as long as they’re well executed.”

Other cancellations that have irked viewers in the past include The Midnight Club, Fate: The Winx Saga, The OA, The Baby-Sitters Club, Gentefied, and Santa Clarita Diet. The hashtag #CancelNetflix continually trended on Twitter last year after fans expressed annoyance over the cancellation of titles that otherwise had a cult following and positive critical scores, some of which even scoring renewals before ultimately getting the axe.