‘Good Girls Revolt’ Was A Huge Failure For Amazon, But Not For The Reasons You Think

The period drama Good Girls Revolt, which focused on a group of young women suing a news magazine for sex discrimination, premiered on Amazon in late October 2016 to positive reviews. When Amazon cancelled the series a month later, the Hollywood trades called it “a surprise move” and characterized the show as “one of Amazon’s biggest series ever among female viewers.”

Amazon cited low viewership and completion rates as the reason it cancelled the series, but the steady drip of stories that studio Sony was shopping the show to other networks built out a narrative that Amazon has simply abandoned it. “We were stunned by Amazon’s decision,” creator Dana Calvo told Buzzfeed. Other cast and crew spoke in interviews about their shock and disappointment, and some writers took the cancellation as a slap at the show’s feminist ideals.

“The decision — particularly given that Good Girls Revolt is about women fighting for equal opportunity in the workplace — seems rather tone-deaf,” the Los Angeles Times’s Meredith Blake wrote. When the top two Amazon Studios execs — men, of course — were later fired over sexual harassment scandals, it seemed like karmic justice for the way they had handled the show.

Well, as it turned out, Good Girls Revolt was a flop — and a bigger and more expensive flop than Amazon was saying publicly at the time. The 10-episode series was viewed by 1.6 million U.S. households, according to a Reuters report Thursday based on a review of Amazon internal documents, but the viewership numbers didn’t appear to be the reason that Amazon cancelled the show.

Analysts have pegged U.S. subscribers to Amazon Prime at 90 million, but the documents reviewed by Reuters indicated that only 26 million of those subscribers were using the Prime Video service as of early 2017. That’s roughly the same number of U.S. subscribers are STARZ and Showtime, and Good Girls Revolt‘s 1.6 million viewers was on par with STARZ’s Counterpart (1.8 million viewers) and Showtime’s The Chi (1.7 million), which were both quickly renewed for second seasons.

The killer for Good Girls Revolt, rather, was that it failed to bring enough new subscribers to Amazon Prime. The most revealing tidbit in the Reuters report was that one of Amazon’s key metrics for original programming is how many subscribers a show brings to Amazon Prime vs. how much the show costs. Amazon calculated a “cost per first stream” metric for each of its originals, which was the number of subscribers who made that particular show the first thing they watched after signing up for the service divided by the show’s budget (production and marketing) to determine how efficiently the show generated new subscribers.

Amazon’s flashy automotive series The Grand Tour had a production and marketing budget of $78 million and generated more than 1.5 million first streams worldwide, which worked out to an average of $49 per new subscriber. Good Girls Revolt, though, had a production and marketing budget of $81 million but generated only 52,000 first streams worldwide, which worked out to $1,560 per new subscriber.

Prime Video isn’t a profit center for Amazon; it’s a lead generator. Amazon is spending $5 billion this year on original and licensed programming for Prime Video in hopes of attracting new subscribers to Amazon Prime who will buy books, t-shirts and paper towels — and Echo, Fire and Fire TV devices that will make it even easier for them to buy more books, t-shirts and paper towels.

Generating new subscribers isn’t the only function of Prime Video — Amazon also needs to retain those subscribers with a steady drip of new video programming — but Good Girls Revolt also didn’t generate the news-media attention, social-media engagement or awards consideration that it would have needed to merit a second season aside from the new households it was (or wasn’t) bringing to Amazon.

It’s worth noting that the Amazon documents obtained by Reuters were as of early 2017, and Amazon Studios has since made some strategic shifts — most notably spending $250 million on the rights to Lord of the Rings with plans to spend as much as $500 million on the first two seasons of the series — and hired Jennifer Salke from NBC as its new network president.

The streaming market is a global business built on franchise properties. Netflix and HBO are already competing globally, Disney is launching a streaming product next year that will eventually be global, and Apple is showing signs of doing the same.

Amazon appears headed that same direction and has no other choice if it wants Netflix, HBO and Disney subscribers to also watch The Grand Tour and Lord of the Rings. As Amazon Prime adds millions more subscribers — and millions more viewers for Prime Video — I suspect the dramas that get second and third seasons will look a lot more like Lord of the Rings than Good Girls Revolt.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider, is a contributing writer for Playboy, and hosts a weekly podcast about new digital content called Consumed with Scott Porch. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.

Stream Good Girls Revolt on Amazon Prime Video