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Girlboss

Netflix has cancelled (by my count) five original scripted shows over the last year, but the most recent one — Girlboss — is a somewhat different case.

Marco Polo, Bloodline, Sense8 and The Get Down were each ambitious, $100 million-plus projects that failed to connect with a large enough international audience to merit continued investment. Three of the four (not including Bloodline) were high-concept epics. Three of the four (not including Sense8) were produced by outside studios, which adds an extra layer of development and production cost. And three of the four (not including The Get Down) got multiple seasons before Netflix pulled the plug.

Girlboss, which premiered in April and which Netflix cancelled late last week, looks like many, many shows that Netflix has renewed over the last several years:

Girlboss doesn’t have special effects or lavish set pieces that would make it obviously more expensive than the typical Netflix comedy, and Netflix produced the series without an outside studio.
Netflix had renewed all of its 20 or so original comedies that preceded Girlboss. Netflix Presents: The Characters apparently hasn’t been renewed, but that was closer to a collection of half-hour comedy specials than a series.
The reviews for Girlboss weren’t great, but Netflix renewed Haters Back Off!, Flaked, Real Rob and Fuller House after worse reviews.
Netflix doesn’t provide ratings data for its shows, but Girlboss generated more worldwide interest on Google Trends over its first 60 days than did Netflix’s Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return, which premiered a week earlier, or Dear White People, which premiered a week later. (Netflix hasn’t announced renewals yet for MST3K or Dear White People, so those comparisons may turn out to be harbingers rather than a distinctions.)

Here’s a look at how Google searches for how Girlboss, MST3K and Dear White People tracked over time:

“I’m always pushing the content team,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said a month ago on CNBC. “We have to take more risks. You have to try more crazy things because we should have a higher cancel rate overall.” Hastings cited 13 Reasons Why as a surprise hit for Netflix and a reason to keep trying different kinds of projects to see what works. “We didn’t realize just how it would catch on.”

Still, to the extent that Google Trends is a proxy for viewer interest, Girlboss looks more like a hit than a miss when placed alongside other Netflix comedies that have premiered or aired new seasons so far this year — generating more worldwide interest at its peak than Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, One Day at a Time or Santa Clarita Diet.

I don’t read the Girlboss cancellation, though, as Netflix getting conservative. Hastings said Netflix needs to take more risks not fewer, and recent/forthcoming projects like GLOW (an ’80s comedy series about a women’s wrestling league), Okja (an effects-heavy Korean film about a gigantic pig) and To the Bone (a film about eating disorders that looks from the trailer to be pretty unnerving) tend to bear that out.

I also don’t read the Girlboss cancellation as Netflix taking its foot off the gas in expanding the volume of original programming. Netflix said in October that it planned to make 1,000 hours of originals in 2017 — a 350-hour bump from 2016 — and increase its programming budget from $5 billion to $6 billion. There are reports every week of Netflix green-lighting new original films, new dramas, new comedies, new docuseries, new reality formats, new foreign-language shows, new animated children’s programming, etc., and Netflix is still renewing the vast majority of its current programming.

Girlboss was the unremarkable middle child in Netflix’s growing programming household. It doesn’t generate awards attention like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, drive family viewing like Fuller House, connect with teens like 13 Reasons Why, expand a global franchise like Marvel’s Iron Fist or drive international subscriber growth like Mexican thriller Ingobernable or Korean comedy My Only Love Song. Netflix, even as it is borrowing billions of dollars to scale up its programming, is also showing Wall Street that it will not countenance boondoggles.

All of which is to say that it’s not exactly clear why Netflix cancelled Girlboss, but the Hastings comments and the fact that Netflix has cancelled several shows in quick succession is indicative of a paradigm shift from Netflix needing to prove to Hollywood that it’s a good place to make shows — creative freedom, good budgets, etc. — to Netflix needing to make sure that every renewal serves a particular strategic end.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.

Stream Girlboss on Netflix