#cancellation

You watch a TV show. You liked it. It's cancelled. You're sad. You find another TV show.

BEWARE OF THIS SCAMMER!!!!!

Well, it happened. I can't say that I'm surprised that KAOS has been cancelled by Netflix. I am a little surprised at the speed at which it was axed. Only a month after it aired, and it's already gone.

That has me wondering if the decision to cancel was made before the show even aired. We have to remember that marketing is the biggest cost after production. If the Netflix brass looked at the show and either decided (through audience testing, AI stuff or just their own biases) that it wasn't going to be a Stranger Things-level hit, they probably chose at that moment to slash its marketing budget.

That meant there was pretty much no way that KAOS was ever going to hit the metrics Netflix required of it to get a season 2.

What makes me so angry about this (other than the survival of a show relying on peoples' biases or AI) is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you decide before a show is ever going to air that it won't be a success, then it probably won't be. If you rely on metrics and algorithms and AI to analyze art, you will never let something surprise you. You'll never let it grow. You'll never nurture the cult hits of the future or the next franchise.

Netflix desperately needs people behind the scenes that believe in stories and potential over metrics. Nothing except the same old predictable dreck is ever going to be allowed to survive if you don't believe in the stories you're telling.

The networks and streamers have a huge problem on their hands. They need big hits and to build the franchises of the future to sustain their current model (which is horribly broken.) But people have franchise fatigue and aren't showing up for known IPs like they used to. The fact that Marvel content is definitely not a sure thing anymore is a huge canary in the coal mine for franchise fatigue. People aren't just tired of Marvel, they're tired of the existing worlds both on the big screen and the small one. Audiences are hungry for something new.

It is telling that the most successful Marvel properties of the last few years have been the ones that do something different. Marvel is smart to finally pull out The X-Men because that is a breath of fresh air and something people are hungry to see more of.

There's pretty much no one behind the scenes (except for maybe AMC building The Immortal Universe) that is committing to really taking the time to build these new worlds. Marvel built the MCU by playing the long game. That paid dividends for a solid decade even if it's dropping off now. That empire was built not with nostalgia for existing IP (don't forget the MCU was built with B and C tier heroes) but with patience. Marvel itself seems to have forgotten this in recent years.

Aside from that, I think people really want stories that aren't connected to a billion other things. That takes commitment on the part of the audience to follow and to get attached to. People WANT three to five excellent seasons of a show that tells its own story and isn't leaving threads out there for a dozen spinoffs. We're craving tight storytelling.

KAOS could have been that. Dead Boy Detectives could have been that. So could Our Flag Means Death, Lockwood and Co, Shadow and Bone, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Willow, and a dozen other shows with great potential or were excellent out of the gate.

If you look at past metrics, you only learn what people used to like, not what they want now. People are notoriously bad about articulating what they want, but boy do they know it when they see it. Networks have to go back to having a dozen moderate successes instead of constantly churning through one-season shows that get axed and pissing off the people who did like it in a hamfisted attempt to stumble on the next big thing.

Yes, it started as a term coined by Black people for just being done with someone, especially after they wronged you.

No, it did not stay meaning that, nor is its origin a reason to withhold warranted criticism of the phenomenon being described by it.

By and large, when people say they are canceling someone, the actions that are taken against that person as part of their cancellation are aimed at their removal from public life, if not society as a whole. Whether this is the conscious or stated aim of every individual in the group trying to “hold them accountable”, it is very clear that, in practice, nothing will satiate the collective anger until that goal is accomplished.

The volume, intensity, and duration of these informal campaigns, even when they derive from legitimate grievances, are routinely disproportionate to the grievances, and in many cases far more extreme than the human mind and emotions are even capable of experiencing without causing immense psychological distress, trauma, and other health problems.

Tactics often include stalking, harassment, public shaming, death threats, sui bait.

Parasocial dynamics create a disproportionate amount of investment in seeing the cancelee suffer. Even in cases where the anger of the individual cancelers is not necessarily excessive in a vacuum, taken together and at volume, it is.

Are there people who will call any pushback “cancellation” and claim they are being “silenced” from the biggest stages available; absolutely, and they’re often grifters, and they suck.

That said, the existence of bad faith claims does not necessarily reduce the validity of criticisms of this fundamentally destructive model of supposed “justice”.

One does not have to be totally & completely “silenced” to have been the subject of a cancellation campaign and suffer the intense psychological & social damage of public shaming, social ostracism, mass harassment, & stalking from it, or to deserve to be heard about that issue. Nor is a “canceled” figure having a comeback proof that “cancel culture isn’t real”, anymore than someone having a comeback after being blacklisted for coming forward about sexual abuse proof that “blacklisting isn’t real”*