Originally published at: 'Lost in Space' season 3 will end the series | Boing Boing
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I disagree. The casting and reimagined plot are actually quite good.
But, you either love it or you hate it.
I love it.
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Haven’t they done enough?
It’s only achievement was it wasn’t as bad as the 1998 motion picture.
(Plus, I’m already hate-watching Foundation and don’t have the time for more hate-watching.)
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I really like this too, and Parker Posey’s a delight in it.
Kinda bummed at Netflix’s continued cancellation of stuff I like. I got done with GLOW recently, which ended with a lot of story threads open, only to find out the next series got canned when the pandemic hit.
This seems to happen all too frequently with Netflix series.
I get the feeling they’re judging the success of a series based on traditional weekly broadcast TV metrics. But the very nature of Netflix lends itself to the “Long Tail”.
I may not watch something when it’s brand new, but I may end up watching it 6 months or more down the line.
And yes, I am still pissed off that:
1: Sense8 didn’t get the full last season it deserved, instead having to cram everything in to a final feature.
And…
2: The OA got canned, when the second season ended on such a cool cliffhanger.
I had problems with the first season of The OA (mostly the end), but the second season more than made up for that, and was pretty much excellent all the way through.
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The wide reporting on Netflix is the opposite. They’re apparently 100% beholden to internal algorithms of some sort that track viewer engagement and predict subscription impacts.
To the point where they’ll apparently show up with bizarre orders about changes that need to be made, like particular characters being into particular activities.
With traditional media approaches a show with low viewership might be kept around anyway. For prestige or critical acclaim. Or because it’s time slot isn’t competitive against a top show. Or a network might do something like give it three seasons and a rejigger, so they can do a big syndication push to build interest.
Netflix just kills shit. Even successful shit. The particulars of their metrics and algorithms aren’t really known. But there’s rumors around it. That they don’t typically go past 3 seasons, because a smaller proportion of the audience keeps watching past 3. That they focus heavily on how much of an episode people watch. Since a lot of people turn things off before they’re finished, they press creators to rewrite and focus structure around that. Apparently often as a moving target too, there are reports of them reversing themselves or altering demands season to season.
They also do really weird shit like launch a reboot of a classic series, with headline drawing cast and a large budget. Then don’t market it at all. The first season of this show was a little bland, but it definitely got there in the end. But it doesn’t seem that anyone even knew it was out there till the 2nd season caught attention.
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Did they kill off Parker Posey yet? Asking for a friend…
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Probably not entirely. Traditional TV is driven by how much advertising money a show brings in, and secondarily the potential for syndication and other subsidiary income. Netflix doesn’t have that. What they care about is engagement that brings in subscribers. And they can measure engagement to a degree that no broadcaster ever could. None of the details are made public. They have a latge but finite development budget, so to make new shows, some old shows get cut. You’d think the ideal thing for them would be limited, self-contained series, with a defined beginning and end. Do it, get the audience, go on to the next thing.
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Ugh, good riddance. Sorry to disagree with other posters on this, no disrespect intended. Your opinion is equally valid. For me though, a big peeve is Sci-Fi where the characters act foolishly and dangerously. This show has that to a huge degree. These are ostensibly trained professionals, and what they are doing (exploring a totally unknown planet) is incredibly massively dangerous. Every single plant and rock is likely to kill them, yet they act like they’re on a family trip to NYC. The kids run around unsupervised, they have no weapons, they play with the plants and eat the berries, they take dozens of unnecessary risks in every episode, etc. It’s maddening and I find myself yelling “what are you doing” at the screen all the time. Halfway through season one I switched to hate-watching it, then completionism. I’ll give S3 a pass.
But yah, Parker Posey? Goddam delightful. I would watch a spin off about her. I liked the guy with the chicken too.
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The only satisfying end to this show will be to get a working ship, put onto it the Doctor, the robot and the kid and fly it into the sun.
Their society is saved.
The end.
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I’m old enough to have vivid memories of watching the original on our B&W teevee (“CRUSH, KILL, DESTROY”), so that show has a place in my heart. However, this new show is far superior. My wife and I enjoyed both seasons of it, and appreciated how the creators took a terrible concept (Swiss Family Robinson … IN SPACE!) and made it make some sense. I like that every episode ended on a cliffhanger, (sort of) like the original, and actually tries to be science fiction, rather than space fantasy.
Netflix, however, pretty much sucks. I don’t think I’ve watched anything on it since “The Queen’s Gambit” ended, and the Netflicker I watched before that was probably season 2 of LIS. We’re considering dropping it – largely because they don’t have enough ongoing series that we’re interested in.
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In this case, at least, the creators say that it was always planned as a three season arc, and since I remember them talking about it early on in the show’s life I am taking them at their word,
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And that I think is the big problem with their approach.
They have seemingly hundreds of original series, documentaries, and movies releasing at any given time.
The vast majority of which no one has ever heard of. Most of them so narrowly targeted you’d be hard pressed to even tell what they are. Most dirt cheep to produce. Some of them are even obviously focused on mimicking Youtube channels.
While their handful of wide appeal series often take more than a year between seasons, and get cancelled at or before 3 seasons.
So the end result looks like a mid market cable network from the 00’s 90% of the time.
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That, for me, plus “scientists” who don’t seem particularly curious.
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And yet we gorge on vampire and zombie fantasy. Give the emotionally compromised scientists a break.
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I’ve noticed this too. Now, I just assume all Netflix series will end with season 3.
It’s the nature of streaming - they’re doing the opposite of broadcast tv show ratings dynamics, it’s all about a show’s ability to bring in subscribers. (Obviously some of the traditional broadcast tv considerations still apply - cost of the show, rights issues, etc. are part of the calculation relative to how many subscribers they think it brings in.) The streaming consensus seems to be that anything more than two or three seasons (except for the occasional tent-pole show) fails to do that, at which point it serves no purpose and gets cancelled. Apparently new shows bring in subscribers, but cancelling them doesn’t hurt retention. (Or at least this is what they’ve decided, anyways.) They have their own complicated metrics for when a show is bringing in subscribers (that apparently no one understands), and popularity doesn’t appear to have much to do with it - a while back Netflix had a rare moment of transparency, where they listed their most-watched shows. They then immediately canceled them (some after only one or two seasons).
But yeah, it’s especially nuts that they cancel shows within days of the shows debuting (without any marketing), not letting the long tail audience establish itself (or really, any kind of audience, in some cases). I end up watching most shows knowing there’s only one season - more than once I’ve read about and stuck a show on my watch list before it came out, then had it get canceled before I watched a single episode.
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I, um, I liked it OK.
Would watch again but only for the first time.
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I agree to an extent, but I cut them some slack since they were trained to live on an already partially colonized planet…not fight alien creatures on a hostile world, etc.
Parker Posey is great, and Ignacio Serricchio who plays Don West (the guy with the chicken) is good too. He used to play Diego Alcazar on General Hospital for anyone who watches soaps.
Honestly, even as a kid I hated the original Lost in Space. It always seemed ridiculously cheesy. Many years ago I got to watch the pilot movie the original series was based on and I quite liked it. It had a much more serious and darker tone.
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I get that, but honestly it just annoys me more. They take so many stupid risks that they should have been dead in the first day. That they aren’t is such blind luck. I want fiction to reward cleverness and hard work, not stupidity (since the real world isn’t very good at that).
A counterexample is Walking Dead. Virtually everyone in that show is incredibly hard working and very clever. They succeed because they constantly outsmart their opponents and the cruel world they inhabit. They come up with clever uses for the dead, they constantly invent new ways to keep going, and they never stop working hard for what they have. The stupid or careless die quickly, which makes the world internally consistent with the danger level being represented.
Aside: I’m not saying there aren’t issues with the writing in WD. The big one is that they vastly underestimate how much food people eat. They have entire villages living on what is enough canned goods for one person for a week. That and there’s a weird libertarian undercurrent to it that, among other things, completely ignores the role of trade and commerce in human survival. People trade immediately and constantly in every situation, yet their world is entirely without commerce for almost a decade. We know from real world disasters that the first thing people do in an apocalyptic situation is they start trading with each other for what they need.
Okay, I’m off topic and rambling here. Back to your regularly scheduled thread.
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