Netflix Struggles to Retain Viewers for Second Seasons

If you haven’t seen the second season of Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, then at least you can console yourself that you’re not alone. Variety recently noted that, while season one debuted with 21.2m views in the first four days after its launch in 2024, season two has been viewed just 8.7m times – which isn’t nothing, but it does mean that the show lost 59% of its audience between seasons.

And this would be fine if it was an isolated case, but it is starting to look as if Netflix is struggling across the board when it comes to getting viewers back to shows they once watched in droves. The first season of Tina Fey’s relationship comedy series The Four Seasons had 11.9m views, but the recent second outing only garnered 4.4m; a drop of 63%. The opening week of Beef’s second season gained 2.4m views, a 58% drop from season one. The second season of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder posted an 80% drop in viewership. And people are only able to estimate the drop in views for Ted Danson’s A Man on the Inside, because the second season didn’t even crack Netflix’s top 10.

Some of these you can attempt to explain away. For example, Beef is an anthology show. When it returned this year, it returned with a brand new cast, setting and story, which essentially meant that it was an entirely different show that happened to share the same name. But Danson and Fey are big-name draws with established fanbases. It makes less sense for them to be abandoned in the numbers that they have.

You could also argue that the current norm for television production, running fewer episodes further apart, is hurting audience loyalty. If it takes two or three years for a show to return, then getting back up to speed on the finer details of the plot can sometimes feel like homework. Unless it’s a show you absolutely adore, sometimes it feels easier to just skip it entirely.

However, this theory doesn’t really hold water. Because HBO takes a similarly long time to drag its shows back to air, and viewership doesn’t seem to suffer nearly as much. The Last of Us gained 600,000 viewers between seasons, despite being off air for two years. The audience for The White Lotus jumped 63% between seasons one and two, and another 57% for season three.

Admittedly not all HBO shows enjoy the same vaulting gains. For example, House of the Dragon’s audience fell by 8% between season two and season three, but it’s important to remember that a) there’s a big difference between an 8% drop and a 58% drop, and b) House of the Dragon is the dullest, do-your-homework show on television. Given that, a loss of just 8% seems fairly miraculous.

So what’s going on? As far as I can tell, Netflix has three things going against it. The first is its release strategy. All those HBO shows I just mentioned came out weekly, which meant that they could sustain, and often build, buzz across their seasons. The White Lotus is notorious for this, cranking up the craziness each week until it dominates the cultural conversation.

Netflix, meanwhile, is largely stuck dumping everything out in one go. The people who love a show will watch it in a matter of days and, unless they love it enough to make a Baby Reindeer-level of noise about it, it will find itself quickly swallowed by newer content. And as good as The Four Seasons is, a gentle relationship comedy is never going to attract that level of buzz.

Second, Netflix defines success not by viewers but by the number of new subscribers it can attract, and that’s much harder to do with a second season of something. If you were so excited by the prospect of an Avatar: The Last Airbender series that you bought a Netflix subscription, then the platform isn’t going to make any more money by producing another season. It already has your money, so the best shot at growth it has is to throw everything at the first season of a new show that might attract new subscribers. The entire business model revolves around dangling something shiny and new in front of viewers, and Danson’s quaint retirement home series is neither of those things.

And then, perhaps, there is the culture of programming at Netflix to contend with. With other streamers, you can point to big tentpole IP shows that have grown to define them. HBO is the home of Game of Thrones. Apple has Ted Lasso. Disney+ has Marvel and Star Wars, and also the FX shows that do well critically. The closest thing to this that Netflix has to this is Stranger Things, and that ended on such a wet fart of a note that nobody can possibly be hungry for any more.

This last one feels key. The other platforms have been very good at forming distinct identities for themselves, while Netflix remains a huge semi-curated bin full of stuff of wildly varying quality. If it can regain a little of the prestige sheen it had a decade ago, it might encourage viewers to stick around a bit longer.