Another week, another cancellation. This time it’s for Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives.
The show premiered back in April, and admittedly it wasn’t my thing. I could see the appeal of it and the love was clearly there across social media from other viewers. There were fanedits, fanart, and the fanvids that people made of the two main boys and how they were meant to be. Also there were plenty of edits of The Cat King. Which I totally get because Lukas Gage looks preppy at first glance but is a capable and talented actor. The point being, people loved the show. And since it was tied to Neil Gaiman, and it had been a couple months since we’d heard anything, I was under the assumption that maybe this show would stand a chance.
Of course that was wrong.
It hurts, as an LGBTQ+ person, to continuously watch our shows be canceled. It feels like streaming services are telling me that stories about people like me aren’t worth it. They aren’t worth the investment past one season and they aren’t worth developing complex and nuanced storylines that connect and change people. This year alone we’ve seen the cancellation of LGBTQ+ inclusive shows like Our Flag Means Death, NCIS: Hawai’i, Uncoupled, Ratched, and Wolf Pack. As for POC inclusive shows, we’ve got the cancellation of The Acolyte, American Born Chinese, The Brothers Sun, and My Lady Jane.
This is part of the job but…it still sucks
As a TV and film critic, this is part of the job. But even I can see the writing on the wall and hear the whispers on social media. For many, it feels like streaming services do not have the same allegiance to us as we have to them. Streaming services want us to give them our hard-earned dollars with an excuse that they need it because they’re creating more content. But where is that content past one season? Where is that content with POC characters? And where is that content with LGBTQ+ stories? Because from where many viewers are standing, this relationship isn’t going both ways. It’s going their way with shows like Dead Boy Detectives getting the ax 4 months after premiering.
It doesn’t matter if a big creator is tied to a show either. A cancellation can still happen. It also doesn’t matter if there is a fandom that pops up around the show in question. Because the bar keeps getting pushed further and further away when it comes to what gets renewed or not and streaming services aren’t telling us what viewership numbers need to be hit to keep a show alive. In addition, it feels like streaming services aren’t investing as much into promoting the content that they have on their slate. They just release it into the wild and hope that it does well. And if it doesn’t after only 4 months, the chopping block it is before they move on to another show that will just get one season too. And the cycle continues over and over again.
Almost at the point of no return….
Streaming services are actively souring the relationship between them and the consumer. And it’s not like I’m naive to the fact that it’s a money game. But if streaming services want to make money, canceling after one season isn’t the way to go. That doesn’t breed loyalty from subscribers. That breeds resentment and a little whispering voice in the back of someone’s head when they start a new show that says, “Don’t get attached. This isn’t going to last long anyway.” As a business, you don’t want that doubt for your brand. And you don’t want subscribers to drop you for greener pastures in another medium like books or comics.
So buck up and get it together. Because streaming services need those dollars more than the average consumer needs to spend it. And viewers are tired of saying goodbye to their favorite shows like Dead Boy Detectives.
Queerly Not Straight posts Saturdays (or when I feel like it) with opinion pieces, listicals, reviews, and more focused on the LGBT community (and occasionally about the Latine community since I am Latine.) If you’re reading this somewhere outside of Fangirlish, it has been stolen without permission.
