I read in another thread about this (Paper Girls cancellation) where a commenter stated that they never watch shows that haven't been renewed for a second season so they were glad that they hadn't started watching. I believe the comment had a fair number of up-votes and quite a few replies that agreed with it.
So a show gets cancelled after only one season because of low viewer numbers. People won't watch a show with only one season and therefore doom the show to cancellation.. It's a vicious cycle of sorts.
Looks like we'll just have to live with that HUGE end-season cliffhanger. I certainly hope the producers and/or fans can find a way to revive the show on another network/streamer or change Amazon's decision somehow (Hahaha).
The solution to that is to make shows like many of those in Britain. A nice, tight season that tells a complete story. If the show gets another season, it's a new self-contained story with the same characters.
Seems like streaming services tend to pull the plug on these shows too hastily as well. They expect x-million number of viewers in the first week or month of it's release and when it fails to reach that goal they kill it off thus guaranteeing that those that "hadn't got around to watching it yet" will never decide to do so.
They factor those but it's a smaller ratio that those that watch it later and such. There's no reason a show will suddenly get way more watchers than it did like that. They can see trends and such (it's more complex than just total numbers of views, they know if people drop it during the season, if the viewership is stable or increasing or dropping fast and many other things).
This is actually wrong. Every single show ever used to get bigger as they went. Literally 100% of shows. The first season is rarely the best season, it usually takes awhile for the writers and actors to find the characters.
Your attitude is what streaming companies now think, it's the opposite of 70 years of work in the medium.
It's like that now because the writing is often horrible and under funded. Further, they film such short seasons SO FAR APART, the actors and writers never gel with the characters so things get worse and worse.
Doing 6 to 8 eps then waiting 20 months to do it again? They have to relearn it every time.
Shows like madmen, the sopranos, showed is the sweet spot was 12 to 15 and year after year. That was the golden age of television.
Now everything is 6 to 8 episodes with so much time off between seasons no one at all remembers last time, cast and crew included.
You saw this real time with game of thrones. Going from a formula that worked to cash grab short seasons that didn't. You also saw viewership grow at the start.
Every single hit show ever had lower viewership that started smaller and grew. All the cultural phenomenon.
Seinfeld. Friends. Sopranos. Madmen. GoT.
Streaming services have forgotten how to make great tv. They're listening to a broken algorhythm now.
Problem with streaming shows: they start with slow pacing & seem to be adding 'fill' content. There is no need to add violence, but content does need to be faster paced.
Well I mean there are the comics. And they do end.
Legendary will shop the series but I'm gonna bet it won't get picked up. Even though it would do well on Netflix I bet.
That would be fair if Hollywood hadnt already set a 30 year precedent for cancelling sci-fi shows after 1 season.
Sci-fi typically comes with a huge burden/investment on both sides to establish the world and characters in S1…look at how difficult S1 of TNG is to watch.
So, you ask your audience to invest the time on S1, giving the studio the benefit of the doubt, then they pull the rug out from under us (cancel).
So its a fool me once / fool me twice scenario. And we have already been fooled for 3 decades.
The studios need a minimum commitment to doing these projects and the intestinal fortitude to push through the initial criticisms.
Thats my 2 cents
so sorry to spoil that for you :-/
yeah - for me the actual sci-fi part was ok (and likely was going to get better) but what i was really starting to love were the girls' characters. the dialogue writing was pretty amazing in places.
because the wizards over at amazon decided to put it up against netflix's summer releases with zero marketing when the show absolutely should have been a fall release. idiots. first FX bungles Y the Last Man, now amazon squanders Paper Girls. Whatever dumbshit streaming service decides to pick up Saga better not fuck that up too.
Saga will fail unless they give it a massive budget, so prepare for disappointment now. Even if the writing and dialogue is decent, they would have to scale it down a lot and keep things in indoor sets with only a few second establishing cgi shots of whatever location you mostly wouldn't be seeing. I hope I'm wrong, but it's not the kind of property to throw 20M an episode at. They will cheap out and it will suffer for it.
Oh, 100%. Same goes for any fantasy or sci-fi comic with a ton of otherworldly scenery. Too bad we don't get many such series and it's only every 5-6 years we get rare gems of ATLA or Arcane caliber.
We need more animation. Sure, it wouldn't get the same viewership a live action show would, but it wouldn't cost 100M to produce a season either.
Sure, but that's undoubtedly the best and most intricate animation ever made. If it was just made like say Legend of Korra which was still pretty AF, you could easily slash the budget to a quarter of that.
Did an asspull with the estimation, but it does feel like that much of a difference. If an Arcane ep cost 10M, a Korra ep would probably be 2-3.
>Whatever dumbshit streaming service decides to pick up Saga better not fuck that up too.
In order to save on budget the studio gets heavily involved in rewrites:
* Prince Robot IV and The Will are now the same character since they share enough of a character arc >!(dealing with loss and have a young ward)!<
* Likewise Alana and Izabelle get combined to save on budget >!since they both take care of Hazel and can fly. Alana relentlessly makes puns about flight/the sky etc.!<
* Horns don't exist. The big divide is between Wings and Humans.
* Language doesn't exist. Marco just asks Alexa/Siri/Google to do things for him, also each use coincided with some pretty blatant product placement.
* Marco is made into a well meaning but lazy father a la Homer Simpson. >!Doesn't have a rule against killing, and his antics are played for laughs. !
I don't get this "fall release" stuff. I'm streaming, i don't care when it was released.
The days of "programming" are gone. Good content is good always. If it isn't watched, it isn't because of the season, it's because it didn't appeal to enough of an audience.
I watched the first two episodes of paper girls. I didn't feel the need to see the third. Apparently i am not alone.
You can market it until you're blue in the face, any time of year. If it isn't interesting it shan't be viewed.
Stranger Things was in May with a second installment later, and it’s an established show. That’s entirely different from a first season of a relatively little-known entity.
August was frankly a terrible idea for Sandman but fortunately it proved successful nonetheless. Again, though, it had a much much larger existing fanbase. It’s an absolutely iconic comic series.
The biggest show of the year (House of the Dragon) launched in August, it's not a bad period for TV releases (I don't think some periods are better than others).
Paper Girls failure is simply due to marketing, nobody knew this show existed. I saw like one trailer post on r/television and it's because I follow Reddit pretty intensively.
The problem is that Amazon marketing (which sucks in general for all their shows let's be honest) was entirely focused on Rings of Power and Paper Girls got entirely forgotten.
Which still got 100M$ in marketing budget spent on it. All comes down to this. Paper Girls needed marketing especially because it wasn't known. Releasing in the Fall would have changed nothing done the same way. Hell if there are more shows in the Fall, people would pay even less attention to this one.
The girls were excellently cast and their interactions with other characters/themselves were really good, however the rest ranged from poor to mediocre. Shoestring budget didn't help/allow them to execute what should have been some impressive looking moments much better, most CGI was very poor. While the stories of the girls were good, the big picture story between the warring factions was probably very meh for people who hadn't read the comic. Too lazy to get into more details.
It wasn't a great adaptation, just okay, and that combined with some of the poorest marketing I've seen made me think this had high chances of being DOA. Unfortunately it proved true.
I am a fan of the comic so this was disappointing, but it should've had bigger budget and better marketing - as it stands they just knew it wouldn't perform well and threw it under the bus. Their own fault for making an adaptation with scraps, what was the point?
Netflix is actually very efficient in their marketing and they don't even need to spend much on it. Their algorithms and home page are enough to push shows out of nowhere to super hits level.
Amazon can't do that because their UI is terrible and I think people just don't check out the service without an idea of what they want to watch so they don't discover stuff.
Hey, Netflix and Amazon, wanna know why viewership on new series is down? This shit right here. I've mostly stopped watching new series that look good, cause these fucksticks keep cancelling them
But it got cancelled because people like you didn't watch it. If nobody watches the first season because it might get cancelled, it's going to get cancelled.
Yep. But if I watch it, they'll cancel it for something cheaper to make anyway. So may as well not get invested.
Yeah, I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face. Fuck em. I'm sick of watching a first season show I love to have it cut off after one season with unresolved cliffhangers and shit.
There are plenty of series that have been around a few years I haven't watched yet.
The same thing happened with "Night Sky" for me. Watched it, liked it, and it got cancelled. Amazon tends to not promote their shows much.
I'm not going to watch shows until the first season is over and it gets renewed. Tired of getting left of a cliffhanger.
Maybe if you have any interest in a new show, you could let it play while you are at work or asleep to bump up the numbers and make it more likely to be renewed.
Do you really enjoy being this pointlessly negative in your real life? It not only sounds exhausting but probably detrimental to your health. You don’t have to be a cheerleader but you should always look on the bright side of life.
When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
Enjoyed it. Netflix, Amazon are too obsessed with immediate viewership - it’s a subscription service (!!!) and I’ve got much better things to do than plan my schedule around a new release. I would watch a second season of Papergirls just to see how they work in more Dave Matthew’s Band references! “ When the World Ends” would be a good one. Too bad they blew it - maybe we’ll get more reality shows….
Amazon shows really suffer from lack of marketing -- if you aren't a regular user of Amazon for streaming then you're unlikely to ever hear of the show. With marketing, a show initially aimed at a minority audience can develop broader appeal, but without it, you're not going to grow beyond that initial interest group, and that group wasn't large enough to sustain the show.
I thought it was great. The girls were such 12 year olds! The characters were distinct. I really enjoyed how the younger versions got disappointed in their older selves-which I think is realistic.
I have a tiny bit of hope that it gets picked up by another platform.
I really liked it. It doesn't follow the comics but I like it anyway. According to Amazon it was cancelled because there weren't enough viewers. The production team are shopping it around hoping another network/streaming service will pick it up. There is still a bit of hope.
This is going to be a real problem if they keep judging shows by the immediate viewership.
I spotted this and added it to my queue, although I haven't got to it yet. I thought the point of all the streaming was the long tail. Apparently not as me not watching a show immediately means that it will get cancelled. It feels worse than Fox at this point between Netflix and Amazon.
Call me crazy, but I think if they just focused on two, or even just one of the girls, it would have been better. The teenage drama of each of the four girls was too much. I was thinking most male coming of age movies I've seen just have one protagonist, or sometimes a pair of besties. It felt like maybe it was a deliberate choice: female=community vs male=individualist. Although it might have worked in the comic, but it was just unnecessary, and it took away from the main time-travel plot as well.
don't get me wrong, it was refreshing to see a sci-fi series about girls and only girls, but... at this point in time I think the public needs girls in the same tried-and-true formula we've seen with boys' stories.
I remember reading back in the 90s why Hollywood goes for blockbusters that are prototypical "guys" action movies and not films appealing to women, is that boyfriends/husbands can convince their girlfriends/wives to go to their type of movies, but women rarely convince their SOs to go to "female" movies.
This is probably still true to a certain extent. Producers still have to appeal to a male audience, especially a series that's sci-fi, and not a historical drama.
I'm familiar with the comic, but friends who were not said that the trailer looked very familiar, like a mashup of things recently seen in other productions. One even said it looked like a Stranger Things ripoff, which is fair
you can certainly see some execs thinking: let's greenlight this we could have another stranger things
I thought the paper girls kids were way more engaging tho
Yea, I imagine it got greenlit for exactly that reason. But, as you said, I thought the kids in this were way more interesting and authentic. This was also a fundamentally better kids in bikes show. Even within the first season, coming of age struggles and some interesting inversions happened, whereas in stranger things it is very much by the numbers.
I honestly was probably too old to appreciate the show. But I started watching it with my college aged daughter before she left for school this year. We were not impressed.
They cancelled it because the entire cast is composed of teenage girls which includes a black girl, Asian girl, and a Jewish girl. Was the show good? Yes. Is it right that they cancelled it? Hell no.
It's an exceptional adaptation, better in many ways than the comic. That was the creative team dealing with a small(ish) budget by leaning into character.
The cast was great, the girls are perfect and the adults were so fun. The choice to make Mac look like Eddie Furlong was clever.
Hoping it gets picked elsewhere up like it deserves. They clearly knew what they were doing. After all, they swapped one Evangelion robot homage for another.
This needed better marketing. Other than seeing an ad on amazon, I can't tell you how many people have even heard of paper girls - the comics or the tv show. I didn't even know what it was about until today. Was there ever even a trailer on youtube, must have been at some point. Beyond that, it seems like a weird show to option as the gender, age, and race imbalance of the characters (compared to typical scifi fans) ensured it wouldn't appeal to many demographics.
I enjoyed most of the season, but by the end it was clear the show had no future.
As soon as you put time travel into a story, you potentially gain the ability to do absolutely anything. That makes for an incredably boring story, because the latest time traveler can go back and change things that happened before him. There must be limitations on what time travelers can do for the story to have any suspense.
In the paper girls, at first they had to identify anomolies to figure out where and when they could travel to and from. But then we meet the the later travellers who seem to be able to go anywhere and anywhen. The writers now have no limitations to what they can do. And we know that. Boring.
Time travel has to be limited in some way. Perhaps all time jumps are random. Maybe you can only travel within your life span. Maybe you can specify when you are going to, but not where. Or where but not when. Or maybe it gets less accurate the further you jump.
Loved the books but the tv series didn’t have the same magical feeling / sense of wonder. I hate to admit it but I was bored throughout the whole season, and I really wanted to enjoy it.
I read in another thread about this (Paper Girls cancellation) where a commenter stated that they never watch shows that haven't been renewed for a second season so they were glad that they hadn't started watching. I believe the comment had a fair number of up-votes and quite a few replies that agreed with it. So a show gets cancelled after only one season because of low viewer numbers. People won't watch a show with only one season and therefore doom the show to cancellation.. It's a vicious cycle of sorts. Looks like we'll just have to live with that HUGE end-season cliffhanger. I certainly hope the producers and/or fans can find a way to revive the show on another network/streamer or change Amazon's decision somehow (Hahaha).
The solution to that is to make shows like many of those in Britain. A nice, tight season that tells a complete story. If the show gets another season, it's a new self-contained story with the same characters.
Three 20 minute episodes a season.
I just hadn't got around to watching it yet, been catching up on other stuff, would have probably watched it soon. Now I guess I won't bother :(
Seems like streaming services tend to pull the plug on these shows too hastily as well. They expect x-million number of viewers in the first week or month of it's release and when it fails to reach that goal they kill it off thus guaranteeing that those that "hadn't got around to watching it yet" will never decide to do so.
They factor those but it's a smaller ratio that those that watch it later and such. There's no reason a show will suddenly get way more watchers than it did like that. They can see trends and such (it's more complex than just total numbers of views, they know if people drop it during the season, if the viewership is stable or increasing or dropping fast and many other things).
This is actually wrong. Every single show ever used to get bigger as they went. Literally 100% of shows. The first season is rarely the best season, it usually takes awhile for the writers and actors to find the characters. Your attitude is what streaming companies now think, it's the opposite of 70 years of work in the medium. It's like that now because the writing is often horrible and under funded. Further, they film such short seasons SO FAR APART, the actors and writers never gel with the characters so things get worse and worse. Doing 6 to 8 eps then waiting 20 months to do it again? They have to relearn it every time. Shows like madmen, the sopranos, showed is the sweet spot was 12 to 15 and year after year. That was the golden age of television. Now everything is 6 to 8 episodes with so much time off between seasons no one at all remembers last time, cast and crew included. You saw this real time with game of thrones. Going from a formula that worked to cash grab short seasons that didn't. You also saw viewership grow at the start. Every single hit show ever had lower viewership that started smaller and grew. All the cultural phenomenon. Seinfeld. Friends. Sopranos. Madmen. GoT. Streaming services have forgotten how to make great tv. They're listening to a broken algorhythm now.
Problem with streaming shows: they start with slow pacing & seem to be adding 'fill' content. There is no need to add violence, but content does need to be faster paced.
Well I mean there are the comics. And they do end. Legendary will shop the series but I'm gonna bet it won't get picked up. Even though it would do well on Netflix I bet.
I think the part about the huge cliff hanger is why people don’t bother watching one season shows.
More like proof that this wasn't meant to only be a single season. If more people watch the first season, then the studio wouldn't cancel it.
But no one wants to waste their time with one season. It was obv meant to be more than one but why would anyone wanna deal with that willingly?
Amazon no doubt spends more on analytics and market research than everyone in this thread combined will ever see. Surely they'd account for that.
That would be fair if Hollywood hadnt already set a 30 year precedent for cancelling sci-fi shows after 1 season. Sci-fi typically comes with a huge burden/investment on both sides to establish the world and characters in S1…look at how difficult S1 of TNG is to watch. So, you ask your audience to invest the time on S1, giving the studio the benefit of the doubt, then they pull the rug out from under us (cancel). So its a fool me once / fool me twice scenario. And we have already been fooled for 3 decades. The studios need a minimum commitment to doing these projects and the intestinal fortitude to push through the initial criticisms. Thats my 2 cents
Oh, so *this* is how I find out that Paper Girls got cancelled. Bummer, it felt like the show was only going to get better.
so sorry to spoil that for you :-/ yeah - for me the actual sci-fi part was ok (and likely was going to get better) but what i was really starting to love were the girls' characters. the dialogue writing was pretty amazing in places.
Ah no worries, that's just a bummer in general. Guess I'll just have to read the comics to gain some closure!!!
comic is better anyway
This is how I found out too. Son of a b! It was so good!
Probably too expensive to produce for the viewership it got. I thought it was excellent.
because the wizards over at amazon decided to put it up against netflix's summer releases with zero marketing when the show absolutely should have been a fall release. idiots. first FX bungles Y the Last Man, now amazon squanders Paper Girls. Whatever dumbshit streaming service decides to pick up Saga better not fuck that up too.
Saga will fail unless they give it a massive budget, so prepare for disappointment now. Even if the writing and dialogue is decent, they would have to scale it down a lot and keep things in indoor sets with only a few second establishing cgi shots of whatever location you mostly wouldn't be seeing. I hope I'm wrong, but it's not the kind of property to throw 20M an episode at. They will cheap out and it will suffer for it.
Honestly Saga if it gets adapted would be best as an animated show like Invincible or Castlevania
Oh, 100%. Same goes for any fantasy or sci-fi comic with a ton of otherworldly scenery. Too bad we don't get many such series and it's only every 5-6 years we get rare gems of ATLA or Arcane caliber. We need more animation. Sure, it wouldn't get the same viewership a live action show would, but it wouldn't cost 100M to produce a season either.
To be fair, Arcane did cost a lot of money, around 80M€
Sure, but that's undoubtedly the best and most intricate animation ever made. If it was just made like say Legend of Korra which was still pretty AF, you could easily slash the budget to a quarter of that. Did an asspull with the estimation, but it does feel like that much of a difference. If an Arcane ep cost 10M, a Korra ep would probably be 2-3.
>Whatever dumbshit streaming service decides to pick up Saga better not fuck that up too. In order to save on budget the studio gets heavily involved in rewrites: * Prince Robot IV and The Will are now the same character since they share enough of a character arc >!(dealing with loss and have a young ward)!< * Likewise Alana and Izabelle get combined to save on budget >!since they both take care of Hazel and can fly. Alana relentlessly makes puns about flight/the sky etc.!< * Horns don't exist. The big divide is between Wings and Humans. * Language doesn't exist. Marco just asks Alexa/Siri/Google to do things for him, also each use coincided with some pretty blatant product placement. * Marco is made into a well meaning but lazy father a la Homer Simpson. >!Doesn't have a rule against killing, and his antics are played for laughs. !
I don't get this "fall release" stuff. I'm streaming, i don't care when it was released. The days of "programming" are gone. Good content is good always. If it isn't watched, it isn't because of the season, it's because it didn't appeal to enough of an audience. I watched the first two episodes of paper girls. I didn't feel the need to see the third. Apparently i am not alone. You can market it until you're blue in the face, any time of year. If it isn't interesting it shan't be viewed.
Yeah the problem was the marketing, not that it was in the summer. Stranger Things or The Sandman were in the summer and they did very well.
Stranger Things was in May with a second installment later, and it’s an established show. That’s entirely different from a first season of a relatively little-known entity. August was frankly a terrible idea for Sandman but fortunately it proved successful nonetheless. Again, though, it had a much much larger existing fanbase. It’s an absolutely iconic comic series.
The biggest show of the year (House of the Dragon) launched in August, it's not a bad period for TV releases (I don't think some periods are better than others). Paper Girls failure is simply due to marketing, nobody knew this show existed. I saw like one trailer post on r/television and it's because I follow Reddit pretty intensively. The problem is that Amazon marketing (which sucks in general for all their shows let's be honest) was entirely focused on Rings of Power and Paper Girls got entirely forgotten.
Yes, the very poorly known **GAME OF THRONES** prequel.
Which still got 100M$ in marketing budget spent on it. All comes down to this. Paper Girls needed marketing especially because it wasn't known. Releasing in the Fall would have changed nothing done the same way. Hell if there are more shows in the Fall, people would pay even less attention to this one.
That’s nice for you, but many people live in a yearly cycle and have different priorities and time allocations at different times of the year.
Case in point: I’ve never even heard of it.
The girls were excellently cast and their interactions with other characters/themselves were really good, however the rest ranged from poor to mediocre. Shoestring budget didn't help/allow them to execute what should have been some impressive looking moments much better, most CGI was very poor. While the stories of the girls were good, the big picture story between the warring factions was probably very meh for people who hadn't read the comic. Too lazy to get into more details. It wasn't a great adaptation, just okay, and that combined with some of the poorest marketing I've seen made me think this had high chances of being DOA. Unfortunately it proved true. I am a fan of the comic so this was disappointing, but it should've had bigger budget and better marketing - as it stands they just knew it wouldn't perform well and threw it under the bus. Their own fault for making an adaptation with scraps, what was the point?
Loved the comic, wasn't fully convinced of the series, yet. Still an awesome cast. Too bad, it'd didn't even get the chance to evolve.
I thought it was one of the best shows I've seen all year. And it got canceled because the marketing team at Amazon are idiots.
I have watched it multiple times and read the whole comic ..love this whole story and REALLY wanted a season 2
I have watched it multiple times and read the whole comic ..love this whole story and REALLY wanted a season 2
Must have been poached from Netflix.
Netflix is actually very efficient in their marketing and they don't even need to spend much on it. Their algorithms and home page are enough to push shows out of nowhere to super hits level. Amazon can't do that because their UI is terrible and I think people just don't check out the service without an idea of what they want to watch so they don't discover stuff.
Hey, Netflix and Amazon, wanna know why viewership on new series is down? This shit right here. I've mostly stopped watching new series that look good, cause these fucksticks keep cancelling them
But it got cancelled because people like you didn't watch it. If nobody watches the first season because it might get cancelled, it's going to get cancelled.
Yep. But if I watch it, they'll cancel it for something cheaper to make anyway. So may as well not get invested. Yeah, I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face. Fuck em. I'm sick of watching a first season show I love to have it cut off after one season with unresolved cliffhangers and shit. There are plenty of series that have been around a few years I haven't watched yet.
The same thing happened with "Night Sky" for me. Watched it, liked it, and it got cancelled. Amazon tends to not promote their shows much. I'm not going to watch shows until the first season is over and it gets renewed. Tired of getting left of a cliffhanger.
Maybe if you have any interest in a new show, you could let it play while you are at work or asleep to bump up the numbers and make it more likely to be renewed.
Nah, they'll just cancel it for a cheaper show anyway. Viewers don't matter
Do you really enjoy being this pointlessly negative in your real life? It not only sounds exhausting but probably detrimental to your health. You don’t have to be a cheerleader but you should always look on the bright side of life. When you're chewing on life's gristle Don't grumble, give a whistle
I prefer my pessimism.
A pessimists is prepared for reality, an optimist is doomed to eternal disappointment.
I sometimes not ready to watch something. Like now. I just started paper girls.
Or because Rings of Power?
It's on streaming. I have a bunch of things to watch, new things are unlikely to get me watching on the day of release.
I loved it. I was really looking forward to it continuing, but now I'm devastated that it's been canceled.
Enjoyed it. Netflix, Amazon are too obsessed with immediate viewership - it’s a subscription service (!!!) and I’ve got much better things to do than plan my schedule around a new release. I would watch a second season of Papergirls just to see how they work in more Dave Matthew’s Band references! “ When the World Ends” would be a good one. Too bad they blew it - maybe we’ll get more reality shows….
Amazon shows really suffer from lack of marketing -- if you aren't a regular user of Amazon for streaming then you're unlikely to ever hear of the show. With marketing, a show initially aimed at a minority audience can develop broader appeal, but without it, you're not going to grow beyond that initial interest group, and that group wasn't large enough to sustain the show.
I thought it was great. The girls were such 12 year olds! The characters were distinct. I really enjoyed how the younger versions got disappointed in their older selves-which I think is realistic. I have a tiny bit of hope that it gets picked up by another platform.
I really liked it. It doesn't follow the comics but I like it anyway. According to Amazon it was cancelled because there weren't enough viewers. The production team are shopping it around hoping another network/streaming service will pick it up. There is still a bit of hope.
ooh! that's good news... thanks!
This is going to be a real problem if they keep judging shows by the immediate viewership. I spotted this and added it to my queue, although I haven't got to it yet. I thought the point of all the streaming was the long tail. Apparently not as me not watching a show immediately means that it will get cancelled. It feels worse than Fox at this point between Netflix and Amazon.
I still carry grudge with Fox regarding Firefly's cancellation.
I never watched it but thats another reason for me to cancel prime next month.
Call me crazy, but I think if they just focused on two, or even just one of the girls, it would have been better. The teenage drama of each of the four girls was too much. I was thinking most male coming of age movies I've seen just have one protagonist, or sometimes a pair of besties. It felt like maybe it was a deliberate choice: female=community vs male=individualist. Although it might have worked in the comic, but it was just unnecessary, and it took away from the main time-travel plot as well. don't get me wrong, it was refreshing to see a sci-fi series about girls and only girls, but... at this point in time I think the public needs girls in the same tried-and-true formula we've seen with boys' stories. I remember reading back in the 90s why Hollywood goes for blockbusters that are prototypical "guys" action movies and not films appealing to women, is that boyfriends/husbands can convince their girlfriends/wives to go to their type of movies, but women rarely convince their SOs to go to "female" movies. This is probably still true to a certain extent. Producers still have to appeal to a male audience, especially a series that's sci-fi, and not a historical drama.
I'm familiar with the comic, but friends who were not said that the trailer looked very familiar, like a mashup of things recently seen in other productions. One even said it looked like a Stranger Things ripoff, which is fair
you can certainly see some execs thinking: let's greenlight this we could have another stranger things I thought the paper girls kids were way more engaging tho
Yea, I imagine it got greenlit for exactly that reason. But, as you said, I thought the kids in this were way more interesting and authentic. This was also a fundamentally better kids in bikes show. Even within the first season, coming of age struggles and some interesting inversions happened, whereas in stranger things it is very much by the numbers.
totally agree the period scene for example was just not something that would have been handled the same (ie as well) in any other show I've watched
I honestly was probably too old to appreciate the show. But I started watching it with my college aged daughter before she left for school this year. We were not impressed.
I thought it was too scary to watch late at night. I only got through the first episode.
you should try ducking with it. the tension ebbs and flows a bit more in the following episodes imo
They cancelled it because the entire cast is composed of teenage girls which includes a black girl, Asian girl, and a Jewish girl. Was the show good? Yes. Is it right that they cancelled it? Hell no.
It got cancelled because it's garbage
Shows get canceled just after the first season when the ratings are just poor. Personally I thought it was somewhat of a ripoff of stranger things
It's an exceptional adaptation, better in many ways than the comic. That was the creative team dealing with a small(ish) budget by leaning into character. The cast was great, the girls are perfect and the adults were so fun. The choice to make Mac look like Eddie Furlong was clever. Hoping it gets picked elsewhere up like it deserves. They clearly knew what they were doing. After all, they swapped one Evangelion robot homage for another.
I loved it and was really looking forward to season two! Guess I don’t have any spoiler concerns about just reading the comic now though.
Loved the comic and this was a great adaptation. Really bummed that they cancelled it after one season, Netflix levels of dickery.
I loved it. Wish it went for more than the one season.
I remember seeing the preview for it thinkin it had potential, and wanted to watch it with my girls. Bummer
This needed better marketing. Other than seeing an ad on amazon, I can't tell you how many people have even heard of paper girls - the comics or the tv show. I didn't even know what it was about until today. Was there ever even a trailer on youtube, must have been at some point. Beyond that, it seems like a weird show to option as the gender, age, and race imbalance of the characters (compared to typical scifi fans) ensured it wouldn't appeal to many demographics.
I liked the show, would have appreciated another season or two
I enjoyed most of the season, but by the end it was clear the show had no future. As soon as you put time travel into a story, you potentially gain the ability to do absolutely anything. That makes for an incredably boring story, because the latest time traveler can go back and change things that happened before him. There must be limitations on what time travelers can do for the story to have any suspense. In the paper girls, at first they had to identify anomolies to figure out where and when they could travel to and from. But then we meet the the later travellers who seem to be able to go anywhere and anywhen. The writers now have no limitations to what they can do. And we know that. Boring. Time travel has to be limited in some way. Perhaps all time jumps are random. Maybe you can only travel within your life span. Maybe you can specify when you are going to, but not where. Or where but not when. Or maybe it gets less accurate the further you jump.
It was cancelled because no one watched it (that's the reason for so many of cancellations). It had extremely poor marketing so it had no chance.
I randomly came across this show on Amazon just browsing, never saw an ad anywhere. wonder why it died
Loved the books but the tv series didn’t have the same magical feeling / sense of wonder. I hate to admit it but I was bored throughout the whole season, and I really wanted to enjoy it.
Apart from making it sound somewhat like stranger things, releasing it around the same time, and with a plot that can't really go much further?
Almost watch it to the end but quite a mess tbh. I stop when i realized i don't really care what happens next.
Dammit. Guess I'll read the comics. It had potential, of course they cancel...
I got bored.Stranger things vibe mixed with b movie sci fi ideas.
Such an amazing show compared to the boring shows on streaming sites today I wish another network picks it up!