In Rare Move, Netflix Doesn’t Renew ‘The Get Down’ For a Second Season

Death, taxes, and Netflix renewing their original shows for at least a second season. These things have been pretty consistent over the past few years.

But in a rare move, Netflix pulled the plug on ‘The Get Down’ one of their biggest flops to-date. Not to be confused with two seasons, the first season was broken into two parts, with the second half releasing last month. Deadline is reporting that Netflix has officially cancelled ‘The Get Down,’ which thus far is extremely rare for Netflix, who often works a minimum deal of two seasons for every one of their originals, even with poor first season performance on the service.

‘The Get Down’ was plagued by budget overruns, and quickly became one of Netflix’s most expensive shows yet. And while the service clearly has plenty of cash to spend on content, the $120 million price tag was too risky to continue, especially with weak reviews and a lack of commercial audience. Baz Luhrmann is claiming that the cancellation is due to his busy schedule, and Netflix is of course remaining somewhat silent on the matter.

To-date, Netflix has renewed almost every single one of its shows for at least two seasons, giving a lot of creative freedom to the projects, and allowing them to develop audiences, even if niche. ‘The Get Down’ didn’t really grasp the attention of that many, and season one part two has been a relatively quiet release.

It had to start happening at some point, but for such a high budget series, this definitely creates reason for pause, that not all series on Netflix are guaranteed a second season anymore.