Yesterday, Variety reported that Netflix has cancelled Kaos after one season, a show based on Greek mythology that premiered on August 29. Despite spending most of its life so far in Netflix’s top 10 list and garnering millions of views, that wasn’t enough for the streamer to bring it back for a second season. What are we doing here?
Kaos starred Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, the paranoid top god of a version of Earth where people still worship him and his pantheon. Stressing out over a prophecy that predicts his downfall, he becomes the center of an actual conspiracy undertaken by gods and mortals. I found the show’s pacing a bit lacking at times, but the world the show painted was funny and compelling. The standout for me was Misia Butler as Caeneus, a trans guy actor who brought a lot of nuance to the canonical story of his character.
Variety writes,
[Kaos] did spend four weeks in the Netflix top 10 charts upon its release, but failed to garner a significant audience in that time. It peaked at number three on the English language TV chart in its second week of availability, with its peak viewership hitting just 5.9 million views.
As a regular human and not a Netflix executive looking at the above paragraph, that seems pretty good to me? The Hollywood Reporter writes that Kaos got 14.9 million views over its lifespan, which it calls “middling” but which doesn’t seem terribly out of the ordinary for other ratings on the list. Kaos has only been out for a little over a month, during which it spent most of its time on the Top 10 chart. It seems a little early to me to be pulling the plug, but hey, I’m just some guy who thought the show was pretty OK!
I am, of course, not just some guy–I’m a journalist who covers TV as part of my beat. I watched the entirety of Kaos close to its release so I could understand the conversation around it and look for potential blog fodder. An actual normal person, with a partner or kids or a job or a regular life to lead, might not have the time to watch a show the moment it airs, especially when the entire series releases at once. A bulk release can be a bigger time commitment than a show that airs every week; it can be hard to resist the urge to watch it all at once, but also easy to watch an episode or two and then not have time for or forget about it, especially if all the critics and websites write about it right away and then move on to the next thing.
Social media reactions to Kaos’ cancellation bear this out, with plenty of people stating the obvious: they didn’t have time to get to it yet! Others say that it’s hard to get invested in a Netflix show written with multiple seasons in mind when Netflix keeps cancelling things; as Forbes wrote about this sentiment last year, “So you hold off watching new shows, even ones you might otherwise be interested in, because you’re afraid Netflix will cancel them. Enough people do this and surprise, viewership is low! And the show ends up cancelled.” I don’t disagree with this sentiment, and data backs it up, but I think it puts the onus on us, the viewer, to drop everything to support a show, instead of the companies like Netflix that actually paid for the show standing behind their work.
When I took my bafflement to Aftermath Slack, Nathan posited that this ties into the culture around how we’re expected to relate to media in general these days. It’s not enough to just watch a show; we’re required to be fans, for better or worse, bingeing shows immediately or seeing movies in theaters on release day, then encouraging others to watch. It feels like if you like something, there’s a certain level of public support you should perform as a ward against it being cancelled or deleted. On the other side, we’ve seen toxic fans wield this power for their own ends, which affects the content of media: IGN reported that Pixar became overly cautious about queer content following backlash to Lightyear, and Variety reported that some studios even do focus groups with “superfans” to assess marketing materials or get a sense of what might anger viewers.
But in a recent newsletter on this phenomenon, Charlie Jane Anders wrote, "Here's the conundrum about super fans in a nutshell: they have some ability to do damage to a movie or TV show, but they have zero ability to make a project successful." Putting aside historical examples like Star Trek, we've seen this a lot lately: the fan outcry over the end of Our Flag Means Death or Warner Brothers' constant deletion of beloved cartoons. Shows get cancelled all the time now, whatever level of positive fandom people perform. If I had to diagnose a cause for this, I'd posit it's the growing financialization of everything: the thing itself matters less than the money that can be attached to it. If positive fans can generate more money--a tall ask, and a marketing responsibility that shouldn't be on them--a thing might stick around; if negative fans can cost a company more money, or even just the threat of it, a thing might get the axe. This feels like it puts the average viewer in a bind: a show can be cancelled if there isn't enough instant buzz and viewer numbers for it, but it also can't necessarily be saved by all the passion and fandom it can muster. Ambivalence then seems like the most logical approach, but that has its own consequences.
It seems clear Netflix didn’t see an audience for more Kaos; at its most basic level, you could say this is the fault of not enough viewers watching it. But requiring that instant enthusiasm and time commitment as a measure of success is short-sighted; in Kaos’ case, it now leaves Netflix with an unresolved story that I imagine will be hard to drum up more enthusiasm for. Not that Netflix needs that now–the show is made, and now it can vanish into the endless onslaught of new shows for Netflix to release and cancel.
