Being a good TV show with a solid number of viewers isn’t good enough to keep a show alive anymore, not in the fickle streaming age.
According to a new report by data intelligence company Luminate, everything we have had to relearn about how TV works in the past 10 or so years has recently been flipped. Old-school broadcast networks renewed 65 percent of their 2025 output, while major streaming platforms dumped way more of their 2025 offerings, renewing only 44 percent.
One reason for the discrepancy could be the traditional broadcast advertising model, which brings in predictable ad revenue through limited time slots and gives TV executives concrete data to make tough calls on a show’s future. Streamers, meanwhile, were a bit loosey-goosey with it.
It’s all digital, so they can fill effectively infinite time slots. If your show is canceled on a broadcast network, it’s because you know the numbers did not justify ad spend. In streaming, cancellation criteria are a bit more mysterious.
Some shows never get officially axed. They exist in a kind of weird TV limbo. Aluminate uses Netflix’s The Politician as an example. The Ryan Murphy show starring Ben Platt and executive produced by Gwyneth Paltrow debuted in 2020, ran for two seasons and 15 episodes total, yet has not been officially canceled, and there’s been no news on whether it will ever receive a third season.
Weirdly, Netflix led all streaming services in renewal rates, keeping about half of its slate alive between 2022 and 2025. That said, 41 percent of its 2025 lineup was ended or never renewed.
Your Favorite Streaming Show Might Be Over. You Just Haven’t Been Told Yet.
The name of the game here is audience retention. With enough hype, you can get viewers to start watching a season, but for whatever reason, a lot of people abandon it after only a few episodes. Theoretically, maintaining a 50 percent completion rate should keep a show safe. In practice, however, that’s not always the case.
A good example is Marvel’s Wonder Man on Disney+. An excellent show that was a hit with critics, and it did pretty well with audiences, with a retention rate of 52 percent. And yet, it was canceled after only one season, even after being renewed.
Some streamers simply do not care, like Apple TV+. It could be a relatively new streaming service still in the self-discovery phase, so it’s throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. That could explain why the excellent Seth Rogen Apple TV+ show The Studio is set to debut its second season soon, even if the first season’s retention rate was a horrific 28 percent.
Overall, Luminate’s report paints a picture of an industry, both streaming and traditional broadcast television, that doesn’t seem to know how to react to the current moment, what works with audiences, or how to consistently generate hits.
If there’s a show you like right now, savor every episode that you can, and try to spread its gospel far and wide to get as many eyeballs on it as possible. Or don’t, because sometimes even success doesn’t mean you get a second season.
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