No risk, no reward, right? But what happens when
a major network risks millions on a show about musical cops?
Developed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski along with "Babylon 5" creator J. Michael Straczynski,
"Sense8" premiered on Netflix in 2015. The show follows a group of
people from around the world who inexplicably gain the ability to
psychically link with each other. Before they know it, they're being menaced by a
secret organization apparently led by an enigmatic individual known as "Whispers."
"Sense8" received positive reviews from both critics and viewers and won a number of awards,
but that didn't stop Netflix from canceling the show at the end of Season 2. An outcry
from fans led to the streaming giant producing a final two-and-a-half
hour-long finale to tie up the story and ensure it didn't end on a cliffhanger.
Variety reported that Ted Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix at the time, confirmed the
show was simply proving to be too expensive considering its small audience. While the company
doesn't generally release information about budgets and viewing figures, the fact that it
cost around $9 million per episode was seemingly too much for Netflix to justify. Most of that cost
came down to the long production time and the fact that it was filmed on location around the world.
Netflix is no stranger to canceling high-profile shows if they don't live
up to the company's expectations — which could mean they haven't managed to attract
enough viewers. It shouldn't come as a huge surprise that "The Get Down" was axed after
just a single season despite rave reviews and numerous award nominations. Created by
director Baz Luhrmann and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, the 2016 musical
drama focuses on a group of teenagers living in the South Bronx of New York during the 1970s.
Netflix announced that "The Get Down" would not be returning to the streaming service in 2017,
having already cut down the first season from 13 episodes to 11. This was largely a result
of costly production delays and the mid-season departure of showrunner Shawn Ryan. According to
Variety, research suggested that the show received just a fraction of the viewers as other Netflix
originals and interest appeared to drop off quickly. Considering the first season apparently
cost around $120 million, it's little wonder that Netflix did not want to commit to more episodes.
"What'd you think, you were just gonna keep running this thing without my knowledge?"
"Information regarding the Mount Inostranka facility has always been on a need to know basis."
"The Event" is an NBC sci-fi thriller series that first hit television screens in 2010 and ran for a
single season before it was unceremoniously shelved after just 22 episodes. The story
focuses on a group of extraterrestrials who crash-land on Earth in a remote region of
Alaska during World War II. Those onboard the unidentified craft are taken prisoner and held
in captivity by the United States, although many survivors evade capture and manage to hide among
the human population. When a new president takes office, he plans to free the aliens
and reveal their existence to the world but is quickly caught up in an assassination attempt.
Even though "The Event" had a strong start when it was first broadcast,
it quickly began to lose viewers. The series also failed to impress critics,
making it a likely contender for cancellation. While an exact budget has never been revealed,
The Hollywood Reporter indicated that NBC spent at least $10 million marketing
"The Event," suggesting that it was a big-budget undertaking.
When most people think of "The Fugitive," they likely picture the 1993 film starring Harrison
Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. Dr. Richard Kimble is framed for the murder of his wife and sentenced
to death for killing her. He's inadvertently freed, however, while being transported
to prison and sets out to find the actual culprit while being pursued by U.S. marshals.
There have been multiple versions of the story over the years, dating back to the original
1960s television series. In 2000, CBS launched a remake of the earlier show, also titled "The
Fugitive," with Tim Daly portraying Kimble and Mykelti Williamson as the U.S. marshal
trying to apprehend him. It was canceled after one season, ending on a cliffhanger.
The Post Gazette reported that the pilot alone cost an estimated $6 million to produce,
a rather large figure for 2000. According to The Hollywood Reporter,
drama pilots cost $5 million on average in 2007,
suggesting that "The Fugitive" was certainly on the high scale for a television series.
Although it is not part of the official canon of the "Star Wars" universe, the "The Star Wars
Holiday Special" came out not long after the first film and is set between "A New Hope" and "The
Empire Strikes Back." It centers on Chewbacca and Han Solo's attempt to visit the planet Kashyyyk
while being pursued by Imperial forces and bounty hunter Boba Fett. The $1 million budget,
which was around 10% of the total cost of "A New Hope," is equivalent to more
than $4.5 million today, so the special was certainly an expensive production.
The show was universally panned by almost everyone who has seen it. Even those
who worked on the project, including cast members such as Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher,
and Harrison Ford, have been critical of the project and how it turned out.
"Do you remember making this Christmas special? I think it was 1978. No, you don't remember it?"
"Star Wars" creator and director George Lucas has even remarked
that he wants to destroy every copy of the special that is still available.
Starring Natalie Martinez, Kate Bosworth, Kyle Schmid, and Sibylla Deen, "The I-Land"
is a Netflix sci-fi thriller that tracks 10 strangers who wake up on a beach without any
idea how they got there or knowledge about their own identities. Conflict soon breaks
out and it is later revealed that this is a digital simulation meant to test whether
violent criminals will return to the way they once behaved under all new circumstances.
After its premiere, "The I-Land" was universally criticized. It
holds a critics' rating of just 8% on Rotten Tomatoes and a similarly bad audience score,
suggesting that very few people enjoyed anything about it. In its review of the series,
Paste criticized its absurdity and called it an embarrassment; the writer stated:
"I have watched some truly, truly bad series in my day,
but few that went off the rails this hard this fast."
Considering that "The I-Land" cost approximately $14 million for a limited
series of just seven 40-minute episodes, few could argue this was a good investment.
2018's "Troy: Fall of a City" was a co-production with Netflix and the BBC.
Set during the mythological age of ancient Greece, the show charts the Trojan invasion after Paris,
played by Louis Hunter, flees Sparta with Bella Dayne's Helen of Troy. This prompts
a war between the two nations as Achilles and the other Greeks attempt to take back Helen.
Despite positive reviews, "Troy: Fall of a City" mostly failed to attract viewers. It
managed just 3.2 million audience members for its opening episode, almost 2 million less than
a typical Saturday evening primetime slot. A few episodes later, this number had dropped
to just 1.6 million in total — a dramatic fall for an expensive show. According to The Times,
the series cost almost $2.5 million an episode, putting it at a total cost of $20 million for its
eight-episode first season. This made it one of the BBC's most expensive dramas ever made.
An adaptation of Channel 4's 2013 series of the same name, "Utopia" is a 2020 Amazon Prime Video
series that was created by "Gone Girl" writer Gillian Flynn. Starring John Cusack, Rainn Wilson,
Sasha Lane, and Desmin Borges, the premise of the show is that a group of young adults
discover a cult comic book and become aware of its connection to a vast global conspiracy. Armed
with this knowledge, they set out to save the world but also become targets for a secretive
underground organization. Amazon canceled the series after a single eight-episode season.
"Utopia" was originally set to be produced by HBO, but the show was
shelved following a dispute over the budget. According to rumors reported by Deadline,
director David Fincher wanted more than $100 million to shoot the series,
but executives at HBO were unwilling to offer more than $95 million.
Although the series found a new home with Amazon, in light of COVID-19's all-encompassing impact
on the real world of 2020, it's safe to say the TV-viewing public of the era was
uniquely disinterested in an escapist sci-fi fantasy program about a deadly global pandemic.
"Cop Rock" was created by Steven Bochco, the man responsible for the hit crime
drama "Hill Street Blues." But "Cop Rock" takes the concept of a typical
police procedural and blends in musical elements. As the various detectives and
police officers in the LAPD carry out their work, a number of choreographed
musical numbers push the story forward and provide extra context to viewers.
"There's gonna be singing and dancing."
"About police?" "Yeah, about police."
As a highly experimental concept, "Cop Rock" was always likely to face an uphill battle and
the show was canceled after just 11 episodes of the planned 13 that were due to make up Season
1. Reports from the time suggest that the series failed to attract a large enough audience and had
average reviews. The New York Times revealed that "Cop Rock" also had a large budget — roughly 40%
larger than equivalent shows in its time slot and was costing more than $1 million per week.
"The Playboy Club" is a 2011 NBC series set during the 1960s that follows the action
around the first Playboy Club in Chicago. The show stars Eddie Cibrian as shady lawyer Nick
Dalton and Amber Heard as a new employee at the club with a closet full of skeletons.
Controversial from the moment that it first hit television screens, "The Playboy Club"
did not prove to be a hit with critics or viewers. The series struggled in the ratings,
losing millions of viewers between the first and third episodes, prompting NBC to cancel the show
mid-season. Showrunner Chad Hodge confirmed that "The Playboy Club" had four completed
episodes that remain unaired, despite the series costing NBC at least $2 million an episode.
"Friends" was one of the biggest shows of the '90s. When it finally came to an end in
2004 after 10 seasons, it made perfect sense that NBC would want to continue
its success in some way with a spin-off. The new series, which made its debut near
the end of 2004 and was titled simply "Joey" focused entirely on Matt LeBlanc's character,
Joey Tribbiani, who moves to Hollywood to try and make it as a movie actor.
The concept made sense, but the execution left a lot to be desired. Kevin Bright, one of the
original "Friends" producers, believed that NBC had disregarded his ideas for the spin-off and
made the show less fun than it should have been. Ratings plummeted from the first episode onward,
and NBC chose to cancel the series midway through its Season 2. Although official figures
about the cost of making "Joey" have never been detailed, U.K. channel FIVE was paying as much as
£500,000 for each episode, a staggering five times more than the usual license fee. Meanwhile,
LeBlanc claims that he earned $30 million for his role in the spin-off.
Based on the 2013 book "The Good Girls Revolt" by Lynn Povich, "Good Girls Revolt" tells the story
of a group of female writers at a news magazine who find themselves subjected to absurd amounts of
sexism. Genevieve Angelson, Anna Camp, Erin Darke, and Hunter Parrish were part of the main cast,
and the show was sometimes compared to the highly acclaimed "Mad Men" by critics and fans alike.
Unfortunately, the high quality didn't translate into viewers,
with Reuters revealing that only 1.6 million tuned in. With a budget in the region of $80 million,
it is little wonder that Amazon chose not to renew for Season 2.
A collaboration between Martin Scorsese, Terence Winter, and Mick Jagger,
"Vinyl" is a 2016 HBO series that focuses on the music scene in New York during the
1970s. As the tastes of the population shift from rock to disco and hip-hop music, a record company
executive does his best to stay relevant in the shifting marketplace. Bobby Cannavale,
Ato Essandoh, Jack Quaid, and Ray Romano had starring roles,
while Scorsese himself executive produced and directed the two-hour long pilot.
"Do you have any idea how f---in' huge that is?"
Before Episode 1 even hit TV screens, HBO had given the greenlight for Season 2. But the
network quickly reversed course. Only months after the show's first season finale aired,
HBO confirmed that "Vinyl" had instead been canceled as it "failed to land."
Costing $100 million for the first season, that accounts to $10 million per episode.
It was one of HBO's most expensive projects, but also failed to find an audience and managed less
than a million viewers on average. Scorsese, however, believes that the series could have
been more successful if he had directed all the episodes and devoted more time to it.
Despite plenty of criticism about its final season, "Game of Thrones" was such a hit that
HBO was always likely to continue the franchise in some way. Fans eventually got more Westeros
with the popular spin-off series "House of the Dragon," but long before that another
project was in the works. Known by its production name "Bloodmoon," this show
was set to take place thousands of years before the events of "Game of Thrones."
HBO officially greenlit a pilot for the series in 2018 and cast actors such as Naomi Watts
in key roles. With a budget of $30 million, the "Bloodmoon" pilot cost more than the $15 million
spent on each episode of the final season of "Game of Thrones." Meanwhile, Deadline reported
that there were long delays and production issues throughout the filming of the pilot,
including a complete re-edit when HBO executives were unconvinced after seeing the first cut. HBO
pulled the plug shortly after and locked the pilot away so that no one would ever get to see it.