The Night Agent was once one of Netflix’s most popular shows, but the arrival of season 3 now has called its future into question, and if there will be a season 4 after all, which previously may have felt like a sure thing.
As I reported yesterday, The Night Agent season 3 has suffered some serious viewership drops. Using newly reporting viewing data, we now know that The Night Agent season 3 so far has suffered a nearly 40% drop from season 2’s views, which already had a 32% drop from seasons 1 to 2. That means since season 1, The Night Agent has lost 60% of its viewers by season 3, down to 8.4 million views in its “opening weekend” this past week.
In the last 2/16 to 2/22 period, The Night Agent lost to the first week of Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model: Season 1 which had 14.2 million views, almost double. It also wasn’t that far away from Bridgerton season 4, nearly a month after Part 1 of that season aired ahead of this week’s Part 2 release. Not good.
Before this, it seemed like it would be smooth sailing to season 4. Deadline spoke to showrunner Sean Ryan who relayed where things were:
“We’ve been working for a while on the storyline. We have some scripts, we are breaking stories. I think you know from the tax credit, there’s a date by which you need to be filming by; there’s time for us at the moment.”
He’s referring to a new California tax credit the show got for filming, and writing already started indicates some confidence. However, that interview was on February 16, before this viewership drop, again a full 40%, was known. Tax credit or not, there have to be some serious conversations about what’s going to happen next with season 4.
A show starting to write a new season is no guarantee it’s renewed. The Abandons, the Kurt Sutter western show on Netflix, had scripts being written before Netflix abruptly canceled it. Another instance was the well-received Dexter: Original Sin being canceled after writing had started as Showtime wanted to focus only on Dexter: Resurrection instead. There are a lot more of these than you might imagine.
A few things could save The Night Agent:
- There has been no significant critical or audience decline in terms of the scores it receives on place like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB.
- The Night Agent is still a “name” on Netflix and its most prominent show in this specific genre, viewed as a quasi-answer to Reacher, by some.
- Season 1, at least, had relatively low episode costs compared to other, much larger productions. This California tax credit would help that further.
But if season 4 does arrive, it really, really needs to figure out a way to reverse this decline. No matter how high you started, you cannot have 30-40% declines season over season and expect to be renewed indefinitely.
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