Numerous factors can influence a decision to cancel a TV series. But ultimately, and unsurprisingly, the vast majority come down to questions of viewership.
In the streaming era, however, “viewership” is no longer as straightforward as it once was, as explored in the new Luminate report TV Renewals & Cancellations. According to our analysis of freshman (i.e., first-season) titles from 2024 through H1 2026, audience retention across a full season — aka “completion rate” — is the single strongest predictor of renewal or cancellation when it comes to streaming series, correlating far more strongly than total minutes watched.
Shows have a much stronger chance of renewal if more than half of the viewers who start a season end up finishing it, with canceled series in the dataset averaging 44% retention versus a 51% average for renewed titles.
Indeed, looking at the most-watched seasons among streamers’ recently canceled shows, it’s notable that the majority fell far short of 50% audience retention (at least in the U.S.), reinforcing this metric as a key benchmark.
But it’s not always so simple: Disney’s Wonder Man, Prime Video’s On Call and The Waterfront at Netflix all exceeded the 50% mark and were dropped anyway.
Each is a bespoke case illustrating the complexities of the TV business. A potential renewal for On Call reportedly fell through due to Amazon attempting to reduce its license fee for the series, while Wonder Man was initially renewed then axed months later.
The Waterfront is a strange case: It was Netflix’s most-watched series globally for three straight weeks, and seemingly cost effective, but creator Kevin Williamson has noted it did not hit the required completion rate quickly enough to secure another season.
Interestingly, series budgets had no predictive power on their own in this analysis, with cost playing a role only when viewed in terms of efficiency — or, in other words, how much viewership was generated for the money spent.
Costlier titles naturally require a larger audience to justify their expense; to help illustrate this, Luminate created the “cost per minute streamed” metric, which weighs a TV season’s total estimated budget against its U.S. minutes streamed in a given time period.
Looking at freshman series’ first 90 days, it becomes clear that cost efficiency is a significant factor in renewal decisions for almost every major SVOD, with the median cost per minute for renewed series lower than that of canceled series nearly across the board.
The two exceptions are Netflix and Paramount+, suggesting that other factors bear more weight in these streamers’ decisions, though in Paramount+’s case, the high-end cost for a renewed series ($0.06 per minute) was still significantly lower than that of a canceled one ($0.11 per minute).
In short, for all the added complexity now at play in the world of television, renewals and cancellations still largely come down to two straightforward questions: How much viewership is the show in question generating, and does that justify its cost? In other words, perhaps TV hasn’t changed so much after all.