Orange Is the New Black’s sentence is up. Netflix announced this week that the show’s seventh season, hitting the streaming service next year, would be its last. After that, it’s dunzo. For many viewers, this is sad news—the inmates of Litchfield have been a part of the conversation for a long time now. But for everyone else, and for the future of TV broadly, it’s a move that’s long overdue.
For quite some time, it looked as though Netflix, with its seemingly bottomless coffers and try-anything attitude, would never cancel anything. The company habitually renewed shows as soon as they hit the platform; it was only expensive deadweights like The Get Down that ever saw the axe. Recently, though, that’s began to change. The streaming service just pulled the plug on the Marvel show Iron Fist after two seasons, and Everything Sucks after one—and comedian Michelle Wolf’s talk show The Break after only 10 episodes. Netflix’s laissez-faire approach to programming, it seems, is coming to an end.
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But wait!, you say. It's not like Orange Is the New Black is getting unceremoniously axed. Seven seasons is a long run! Yes, that’s true; and compared to something like Everything Sucks, OITNB got more than enough time in the sun. But that’s what makes this news even more surprising: It was a popular show, and one of Netflix’s flagship original programs. It’s partially responsible for binge-watching becoming a thing. Coupled with the news that House of Cards will be ending after the season set to launch next month, the old guard is slowly being phased out. (Yes, HoC is maybe ending for other, Kevin Spacey-related reasons, but if The Conners has taught us anything, popular TV shows can survive problematic stars.) And frankly, Netflix—and its subscribers—are better off.
It's not that OITNB and HoC aren’t laudable shows, it’s just that their time has passed. Both were better in their first few seasons, and unlike with the network TV model where successful shows can limp along way past their prime, Netflix is pulling the plug. People think of the streaming service’s $8 billion content budget—85 percent of which is earmarked for original programming—like it’s a Scrooge McDuck money pit, but it's not. And now that it’s not the only big player in the streaming game, it’s got to practice austerity. Amazon and Hulu are already spending billions on content, and Apple likely won’t be too far behind when it launches its original offerings. Also, now that other streaming services are competing with Netflix for Emmys and Golden Globes, Netflix’s margin of error is even smaller.
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If viewers are going to have to part with shows like Orange Is the New Black, then one hopes they'll get better programming in its place. Perhaps clearing that show off the ledger leaves money for the next great sci-fi show like Black Mirror or Altered Carbon. (It also might just free up showrunner Jenji Kohan to make her next Great Idea series.) It could also be that the cash just goes to Netflix-contracted creators like Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, American Crime Story) and/or Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy), who recently reported her deal with Netflix makes her “the highest-paid showrunner in television.”
The clearing away of relatively old(er) programs could also pave the way for Netflix's ever-increasing film efforts. The company has been bold in its push for both big-spectacle fare like Bright and Oscar hopefuls like Alfonso Cuarón's soon-to-be-released Roma. Netflix’s movie strategy has, much like its TV strategy, always seemed like a mix of what the algorithms suggest and what critics tend to prefer. Maybe the company’s recent spate of cancellations indicates that it’s going to dial in and refocus the content it’s looking to release. So long, space-fillers like Lovesick (née Scrotal Recall); hello, Mudbound.
Of course, it’s almost impossible to know Netflix’s plan for certain; given that not even creators know how many people watch their shows, it's not like the company is going to be up front about about its internal decision-making. But in announcing the end of Orange Is the New Black, the company has proven it isn’t afraid to kill its darlings—a death it deserves to be pardoned for.