Netflix subscribers still stung by the egregious cancellation of an acclaimed original weeks after it premiered

Cr. Quantrell D. Colbert/Netflix © 2021

The top brass at Netflix have made it clear on a number of occasions that viewership is the number one driving force behind whether or not a series gets renewed or cancelled, which made the ruthless axing of Archive 81 all the more baffling.

The episodic supernatural horror cracked the Top 10 in 85 countries around the world, spent three weeks in the streaming service’s global Top 10 in total, and accrued over 128 million hours in the first 28 days it was available on the platform, and yet it was still tossed onto the scrapheap a mere 69 days after its debut, despite ending on a cliffhanger that set up another season.

Throw in a Certified Fresh critical approval rating of 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the call to cast Archive 81 into the wilderness makes even less sense, especially when you consider that it almost certainly cost a great deal less than many other Netflix exclusives that didn’t fare anywhere near as well among audiences.

It’s been a year and a half since the investigative podcast adaptation was dragged round the back of company headquarters and sent the way of Old Yeller, but it’s clear that subscribers still aren’t over it. In fact, a Reddit thread that claimed “things wrapped up” by the end of the final installment led to an outpouring of indignation, with everybody else outlining their fury at Archive 81 being sent packing well before its time.

Having canceled dozens upon dozens of genre shows with reckless abandon, though, it’s not even that surprising that a critically-acclaimed and statistically proven success wound up being swept under the rug in under 10 weeks.

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Scott Campbell

News, reviews, interviews. To paraphrase Keanu Reeves; Words. Lots of words.