Netflix can't keep viewers for season 2, even of their good shows

Lucas Shaw: Netflix Viewers Are Abandoning Shows After One Season

One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season and another 35% for its third season. These figures are all through the first four weeks of a show’s release and come straight from Netflix. Adding insult to injury, the latest season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of Netflix’s most-watched titles in 2024,suffered a drop of more than 60% over week one. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the month.

I think there's something timeless about traditional TV releases. Netflix shocked the industry when they released the first season of House of Cards all at once, but many years later, it sure seems like the weekly release cadence has much more power. The novelty of getting a whole season at once was fun, but I think it turns out going back to the same show week after week is actually something we enjoyed more than we realized.

I think there's something special about watching a TV season over a few months. I think about the spring of 2025 as the spring where I enjoyed seeing Jason Mantzoukas on Taskmaster. I'll remember mid-2026 as when I watched Widow's Bay or The Pitt. Not only did these shows occupy my attention for longer periods of time, they also got to have a whole ecosystem develop around them. Reaction podcasts and online theorizing all happened as we watched the same thing every week and got to think about it for more than 5 seconds before the next episode auto-played. I'm just saying, cliffhangers work a lot better when you have to sit on them for a while.

Is this why Netflix really struggles to get people to watch past the first season? I don't know. What I do know is that people develop relationships with shows that strengthen as they go on. It's worth noting how weird it is for the first season of a show to be its highest rated. Most shows build an audience over the first few seasons, with seasons three and four really hitting their stride, both artistically and viewer count. Netflix definitely makes some trash, but they also make a lot of good shows as well, and those good shows are also seeing massive audience drops. This isn't some sort of scientific data I'm bringing to the table, but I do think there's something to the idea that the way Netflix distributes their shows, people don't build up a strong relationship with them, so they don't stick with them after the initial novelty of season 1.