One Piece
The longer a show remains on top of Netflix’s top 10 list, the more likely it is to get renewed. But One Piece? The huge-budget series did not make it a week before being dethroned, raising questions about whether Netflix will keep investing in a season 2, despite such a positive reception.
It’s not like some megashow came back to replace it. #1 is now Shane Gills’ Beautiful Dogs comedy special, a mere 52 minute feature. Now, with such a short runtime, it’s possible that One Piece comes back to #1 in a day or two, but the fact that the stand-up show displaced it at all is not great.
One theory is that viewers were so passionate about One Piece they binged it very quickly and moved on. It did rack up 140 million viewing hours between August 31 and September 3, which is good in the larger context of the service. But One Piece is a very expensive show, and the more a show costs, the better it needs to perform to justify its existence (see: Altered Carbon, which didn’t do well enough so it had its budget slashed for season 2, which was bad, then it was cancelled).
One Piece
I think Netflix would be wise to continue to invest in One Piece here. They need to find new ongoing series after many of their top favorites are ending like Stranger Things. One Piece seems like it could benefit from word of mouth, and I hope it ends up getting renewed. Lord knows there’s enough source material to keep it going forever.
The rest of the list is pretty standard, Who Is Erin Carter?, Live to 100, The Ultimatum, Painkiller all moving down after performing well. New episodes of SWAT, a Netflix licensed deal, have made the list. And this is the first time I realized that Disenchantment was still getting new seasons, and the animated show is actually up to five seasons now. How did that happen? Another licensed show, Call the Midwife, a long-running class, just put its 12th(!) season on Netflix too, which has made the list at #10.
One Piece is the biggest question mark here. I would absolutely recommend the series no matter if you have any experience with the manga or anime. I didn’t, and I’m having a great time with it halfway through the series so far. I hope it ends up as a long running feature for Netflix, though in this day and age of streaming and strikes, nothing is a guarantee.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.