Despite Top 10 placement, Netflix cancels Archive 81
By Dan Selcke
Netflix is known as the streaming service that greenlights just about anything. That’s good for subscribers, but there’s another edge to that sword: Netflix cancels shows just as easily as it approves them.
The latest victim is Archive 81, a new horror series that debuted back on January 14. Produced by Saw and The Conjuring director James Wan, the show followed Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie), who’s hired by the mysterious Virgil Davenport (Martin Donovan) to restore some old video tapes. While working, Dan stumbles across a supernatural conspiracy involving warring cults. He may have even stumbled across the answer to how his family died in a fire years ago.
But according to Deadline, Netflix has cancelled the series, so we’ll never get those mysteries resolved even though showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine fully planned to. “We definitely know who [started the fire], and that is Season 2,” she told Entertainment Weekly a while back. “There are a lot of little Easter eggs or little things like that, that if you’re like, ‘I wonder if that’s something that is part of the mythology and that will be explored further?’ And, yes. Some things just didn’t actually make it into the season. When you build a mythology series, you build out all this mythology, and then you’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t have room for all that.’ So that was a piece that we ended up saving for Season 2.”
Only now…nope.
Why did Netflix cancel Archive 81?
We don’t know exactly how well Archive 81 performed, but it did break into the weekly Top 10 lists for both Netflix and Nielsen, so it found an audience. So why did Netflix cancel it anyway? We can only speculate. Perhaps even with solid numbers, it didn’t meet Netflix’s threshold for renewal considering the budget the show had.
That’s a bummer, because Archive 81 was inventive and creepy. And who knows? Maybe with another season or two under its belt it could have developed the bigger audience Netflix wanted. I’m sure there are lots of fans who would prefer Netflix nurture a show’s potential rather than cancelling it the second it doesn’t meet some arbitrary metric.
Next. Halo’s Pablo Schreiber talks playing the Master Chief, filming season 2. dark
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h/t SyFy Wire