If David Benioff and DB Weiss, creators of the ‘Game of Thrones’ series for HBO, aren’t safe… no one is. After signing for 200 million dollars by Netflix, one would think that they would become the spoiled children of the platform, but nothing is further from reality. His first series produced for the platform, ‘The Director’, has been cancelled.
The strange case of Benioff and Weiss. The creators of the great success of HBO went through a stage of doubts and jumps between platforms before accepting the juicy 200 million from Netflix. For example, ‘Confederate’ was seen involved in controversy, the series they were preparing for HBO itself and which was criticized for its veiled racist starting point.
Later they also left without coming up with anything concrete about an untitled Star Wars project. And they ended up coming to Netflix, where they have launched not only this already canceled ‘The Director’, but also the adaptation of ‘The Three-Body Problem’ by Liu Cixin. An adaptation that, by the way, may also have unexpected obstacles to face: for now, Tencent has gone ahead with a production of Chinese origin and whose first chapter is already free on YouTube.
The director, another victim. Actually, Benioff and Weiss are not the creators of the series, but rather its executive producers, but they were very close to those responsible: Amanda Peet (a veteran actress making her production debut here and Benioff’s wife) and Annie Julia Wyman. The series premiered on August 20, 2021, and was met with rave reviews from critics. This first year it only had six episodes that were unfortunately left open waiting for a new batch of stories.
The series focuses on the English department of a prestigious university, whose management chair is occupied by a woman for the first time. Her conflicts with her peers and her turbulent private life are intermingled in a light-toned series and she benefited from her excellent cast, where she especially highlighted Sandra Oh fresh out of ‘Killing Eve ‘.
Netflix, the bleeding that does not stop. ‘The Director’ is the latest in a long list of series produced by the platform that are canceled for not meeting the results that Netflix expects of them. The case of ‘1899’ has been especially high-profile due to the expectation its premiere aroused and because it came from particularly successful creators such as those of ‘Dark’. But it is not the only surprise cancellation, not even remotely: ‘The warrior nun’, ‘The midnight club’, ‘Blockbuster’, ‘Destination: The Winx Saga’, ‘The first death’ or ‘Space Force’ have been others to which the platform has put an end in 2022,.
The problem is that, as with ‘The Director’, these are series that in most cases have not had time to close the stories they proposed. They remain open and leave viewers hanging, which is especially bloody in cases like that of ‘1899’, which bases a large part of its appeal on the fact that its mystery is only resolved with the end of the story, which will never come.
The rate of terror As we said in its day, it is not a problem of audiences, but of viewers who complete the series. Netflix is interested, more than the specific audience at the time of the premiere, the “completion rate” or percentage of viewers who watch the entire series.
It is a figure that gives a more accurate overview of how profitable it can be to launch a new season, beyond a specific number of viewers. But it’s having an unintended consequence: Netflix is gaining an undeniable reputation as a platform that doesn’t care about its viewers, and doesn’t respect their wishes to finish watching the stories they start.
