Half Bad: The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself will be available on Netflix UK on October 28th, 2022, based on the Sally Green novel. Despite receiving high marks from critics and audiences alike, Netflix has decided not to renew for a second season.
Joe Barton, who previously worked on iBoy and Giri/Haji for Netflix and is currently working on Our Man from Jersey, adapted the book for Netflix. The show has a 92% rating from critics and a 91% rating from audiences on RottenTomatoes. IMDb has given the film a 7.6/10 rating.
Netflix has decided not to renew the show for a second season just a month after it premiered. Joe Barton (showrunner) and the series’ production company, Imaginarium, both confirmed the cancellation on Twitter. We would have predicted a cancellation based on the show’s early performance. Still, given that the title is from Netflix UK, the barrier to renewal should have been lower, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
It’s important to note that several keen viewers noticed that Netflix changed the show’s name and assets after it premiered. The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself was the name of the show when it first debuted; however, Half Bad has since been added to the front of the title.
This is actually the third name change for the series, which originally went by the name Half Bad when it was in development. Netflix seldom does something like this, but if we put our conspiracy theory hats on for a second, we can come up with three possibilities as to why it might:
- In order to increase name recognition, they wanted the title to more closely resemble the title of the book the show is based on.
- The title is underperforming, and it is much simpler and somewhat sanitising to have people search “Half Bad” instead than “The Bastard.”
- They intend to continue the show, but each season will have a different subtitle (after all, the main book series is called Half Bad).
How popular on Netflix is Half Bad: The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself?
Before leaving the top 10 global Netflix charts in week three, the show spent two weeks there and accrued 44.72M hours of viewing. Despite not appearing in week 3, we do know that it received fewer than 18.17M views, which is a decline of almost 60%. We have already mentioned that shows that experience a 50% dip from weeks two to three frequently end in disaster.
We can determine exactly where the show is performing the best by looking at the raw top 10s provided by FlixPatrol, and it appears that nations like India, Brazil, and Germany are where the title is gaining the greatest traction.
According to their data, the show peaked four days into its run, and after over 20 days, it has all but vanished from the top 10 lists. The title only spent 13 days in the top 10s in the UK, the country where the show is from, before falling out.
There is obviously a lot of source material to cover, but overall, the programme has mostly diverged from the books in this regard. Joe Barton, who has described the show as more of a spiritual adaptation, has confirmed this. There were three volumes written in total, and a companion novella was also published.
