The Midnight Club, a YA horror series, has been officially cancelled by Netflix after just one season. According to a story from The Wrap, despite the series’ excellent reviews, viewership was its biggest problem. Only three weeks were spent by The Midnight Club in the Top 10 lists on Netflix.
With 18.8 million hours of viewing in its first week, it premiered at number 4, reached its high at number 3 in the following week, and then fell back to number 5 in the following week. The Midnight Club totally dropped out of the Top 10 in its fourth week due to shows like The Watcher and Dahmer. All of this prompted Netflix to conclude that those figures didn’t make a second season’s price tag necessary.
This cancellation comes shortly after it was revealed that Flanagan and his business partner Trevor Macy had struck a new exclusive agreement with Amazon Studios that would have allowed the director’s Intrepid Pictures to create new films that would exclusively be available to watch on Prime Video. The Fall of the House of Usher, which will debut next year, will be the last series that Flanagan will produce with the streaming service under his current contract. It seems like this Amazon announcement was the last straw that sealed The Midnight Club’s fate, even though it’s likely that the ultimate decision on this series was taken weeks ago.
The news is especially disappointing for horror enthusiasts because this was Flanagan’s first non-limited show. The season finale made it very clear that The Midnight Club was intended to last for more than one season. Fans were left hanging on the cliffhanger regarding Langenkamp’s Dr. Stanton and her enigmatic link to the Paragon cult.
In an interview with Collider, Flanagan said, “This is the first time we’ve ever designed anything to be ongoing. And it’s strange, it’s a whole new vibe, because you want the season to wrap up and be satisfying. But you need to leave enough on the field that people might want to come back. So that negotiation is tricky. And you know, usually we’re done with the show, we can talk about it, it’s in the past. With this one, we have no idea if it’s going to come back or if we’re going to be doing more. So it’s all very kind of suspenseful for us, we get to experience the tension for a change. It’s fun.” He added, “If we don’t get a second season, we are going to put it all over Twitter and everybody will be able to see what we had in mind.”