New Report Reveals How and Why TV Shows Are Dying

Data intelligence company Luminate released a 32-page report digging into the wave of canceled TV shows from streaming, broadcast, and cable in recent years.

Starting mainly in 2022 and ending in 2025, one of the report’s first interesting pieces of data concerns Netflix: notorious for killing shows, it turns out the streamer’s renewed nearly (or more than) 50% of its scripted and unscripted works in this research period, either surpassing or being not far behind competition like Prime Video or Paramount, depending on the year. (For example: a 57% renewal rate vs. Paramount’s 38% in 2023, or 49% in 2024 compared to 62% from Prime Video.) And while Netflix’s cancellation numbers have gone up and down in this four-year period, there’s a cheat in that some shows are quietly ended or never renewed.

“Excluding planned endings, which may or may not be voluntary from the series’ creators, about 41% of Netflix’s U.S. slate in 2025 was not renewed, versus only 11% that was canceled outright,” wrote Luminate. “Still, it outranks all of its competitors both proportionally and in raw numbers when it comes to renewals.”

Regardless of the platform, streaming is very much not great for freshman shows (scripted or unscripted), not like broadcast and cable can be. Across all four years, chances of a scripted streaming show making it to season two were 48% minimum, and at best, 55%. A big issue is retention: Luminate’s list of recently canned series from major streamers shows Wonder Man had a 52% retention (or 6.5 million estimated views), making it the third-highest of a group whose lowest is AppleTV’s The Last Frontier with a 30% retention rate. Usually, shows with 50% retention or higher get to come back—but as Wonder Man recently showed us, that’s not a hard rule.

The metrics above cover live-action, but things aren’t much better for adult animation on streaming: Luminate revealed the medium’s continually dropped in terms of premieres and renewals between 2021 and 2025. As for kids animation, it’s also seen declines, with both streaming and cable having fallen to near or below 25% as of 2025. Both animation demographics have been hit hard by cutbacks and shifting company priorities in recent years, even as kids content’s said to have a “relatively stable” presence on cable.

Luminate’s report has a lot to read through, but one takeaway is that streaming and cable TV are in rough spots. Whereas broadcast’s more likely to see renewals thanks to “often more straightforward programming decisions…and uncomplicated viewership data,” cable’s becoming a “veritable ghost town” as companies like NBC and Disney pull back on renewals. (Case in point, the latter had a small drop from 33% in 2024 to 31% in 2025, whereas AMC, between those two years, declined from 57% to 30%.)

However good shows like Lanterns and Reacher are said to be doing, there are visible cracks in the TV ecosystem, thanks in part to Hollywood’s ongoing economic troubles. And if you’re wondering about the current outlook on 2026’s TV slate, Luminate called it “not encouraging” based off gathered data for the year’s first half.