No, Netflix, It’s Not Our Fault ‘One Day at a Time’ Is Canceled–It’s Yours

The worst has happened: Netflix canceled One Day at a Time and I just don’t know what more you, me, anyone could have done to reverse this decision. To be as blunt as Lydia after taking a pot lozenge, this is a dumb decision. If you want to know why this is a dumb decision, seriously just scroll through Decider’s One Day at a Time tag. The show handles politics better than any other sitcom, tackles issues like anxiety with a deftness no show comes close to, consistently turns out the most powerful performances on all of television, and, to sum up, is flat-out the best show Netflix has ever produced. Ever.

Did I write all of those articles? Yes I did. Am I alone in thinking all this? No. Not by a long shot. Clock the 98% average critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, including two perfect 100% seasons. But none of that was enough. Getting #RenewODAAT trending on Twitter for days and days wasn’t enough. Even though One Day at a Time is a sitcom masterpiece, the only show on TV right now brave enough to tackle issues on gender, sexuality, trauma, racism, harassment with empathy and respect while still making all of it funny, that wasn’t enough for Netflix.

The real gag of it all, though, is that Netflix–the network that just cancelled the show–recognizes how important it is!

You can’t cancel a show that is telling powerful stories about representation and then be like “we must continue finding ways to tell these stories.” It’s like chopping off one hand and being like, “Having two hands is so great, I must continue to find ways to have two hands.” That’s a clunky metaphor but I’m reeling with my feelings right now, so just go with it.

The problem, Netflix claims, is that not enough people watched the show.

The problem is that none of us have any way of knowing what that means. Because Netflix keeps all of their data secret, because we don’t even have the ol’ quasi-reliable Nielsen numbers that network shows have, none of us have any way of knowing how any shows are doing. All us normals have are Google Trends numbers, which measure how many people are searching for any combo of words at any given time. If you look at that, the only real metric anyone without a Netflix employee ID has, One Day at a Time Season 3 was the show’s most popular season.

By a lot, by the way. Of course that doesn’t mean that translates into viewership, or maybe it does. The thing is, none of us have any access to this info! What we get from Netflix are super complicated numbers that take sleuthing to figure out, numbers that other Network heads give major side-eye to and call “not remotely accurate.”

As when any show gets canceled, there is talk of the show’s producers and production company shopping the show around to keep the love going. ODAAT co-showrunner Mike Royce tweeted this:

The thing is, nestled in this message–a message I will cling to with sincere devotion the same way Schneider clings to the Alvarezes–is a telling bit of info: “along with our studio Sony.” Maybe this is getting into conspiracy territory, but this happens time and time again as Netflix gets more and more successful: shows produced by outside production companies get the ax even if they’re massive critical or cultural successes. We saw this with Fuller House, we saw this with all of the Marvel Netflix shows, we saw this with American Vandal. No number of Peabodies or perfect Rotten Tomatoes scores or Twitter campaigns or insane Google search traffic helps.

I keep asking myself what I, you, we could have done to keep One Day at a Time on Netflix, and it seems more and more likely that the answer to that question is invent a time machine and make sure ODAAT is produced by Netflix, too. This truly wild development doesn’t change the facts: One Day at a Time is still the best show on Netflix, and it will remain that way forever (or at least as until the streaming rights revert back to Sony).

Stream One Day at a Time on Netflix