Netflix Co-CEOs Say Streamer Has “Never Canceled a Successful Show”

This year has opened with streaming networks giving the boot to very popular shows like HBO Max‘s Sweet Life: Los Angeles and the Gossip Girl reboot to Netflix canceling Warrior Nun and 1899.

Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters told the Bloomberg Screentime newsletter that the company “never canceled a successful show” regarding the streaming service canceling very popular Netflix shows, which stirred outrage on social; media.

“A lot of these shows were well-intended but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget,” he explained. “The key to it is you have to be able to talk to a small audience on a small budget and a large audience at a large budget. If you do that well, you can do that forever.”

HBO Max announced the news of the cancelation of the Gossip Girl reboot due to the Discovery merger and also partially because the reboots cost a whopping amount of money.

Money costs are fine if the show is received well by a bigger audience. For instance, Squid Game costs a lot for Netflix but was at the No.1 spot for weeks, which is why the show is coming back.

“It is very rare that a show like “Squid Game” from Korea would be as global as it was. Within 30 hours, the world was watching ‘Squid Game’ with no human intervention to try to market ‘Squid Game’ to the world,” he said. “We’re just getting started to make ‘Squid Game’ not an unusual thing, but basically something that happens literally every week.”

Then Sarandos explained Netflix as a mixture of “HBO, AMC, FX, the Food Network, HGTV and Comedy Central.”

“You used to have to hunt through 500 channels of cable to find them all and now they’re gonna be on Netflix,” he explained. “The measure of quality is, if you love a dating show, make it as good as ‘The Ultimatum,’ make it as good as ‘Love is Blind.’ There’s no difference in prestige quality television in each of these genres as long as they’re well executed.”

Some big changes are coming to Netflix, including the crack-down on password sharing and experimenting with live programming.

“Those people know how to watch Netflix. They’ve watched something on Netflix that they’ve loved. Our job is over the next couple of years to win all of them back,” Peters said. “We won’t do that out of the gate. Some of those folks are borrowing because they’re more price sensitive, they’re less engaged or whatever. But if we deliver a ‘Wednesday’ every week, if we deliver a ‘Glass Onion’ every week, we’ll get the vast majority of those viewers back.”