Dead Boy Detectives Canceled, Why?
The show is now also dead, and Netflix killed it.
Tori Kiolbasa
Dead Boy Detectives Netflix poster, 2024, IMDB, October 13, 2024, <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15358446/?ref_=tt_mv_close>
At the end of August 2024, “Dead Boy Detectives” was declared dead. The Netflix show that had to fight to get created will not be receiving a second season. After being greenlit in 2022, dealing with DC licensing and getting passed from HBO to Netflix, the show took a while to get to the screen. However in April of 2024 it was released and it was popular. Dead Boy Detectives, received rave reviews for its comedy, tone and acting. Yet, only four months after its initial release, Netflix decided to cancel the show. It was in the top 10 Netflix shows for weeks after its release, so this decision came as a shock to “Dead Boy Detective” fans.
As the name suggests, the show follows two dead boys who decide not to go into the afterlife but instead become detectives. The two boys join forces with a medium who can see them to solve mysteries. The show received great reviews from both critics and general audiences alike. With over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, it is clear that the show was well liked. So then why are they not making a second season? Numbers. Even with the positive reviews, Netflix decided that it did not have the “opening week” viewership they wanted. Although the joy of a streaming platform is that there is no time constraint on viewership, Netflix still cares about this “opening week.” The viewership went down within the first week it aired, and Netflix took that to be a bad sign, even if the people who watched it loved the show. The issue may not have even been how many viewers there were, but the internal ranking Netflix has. “Dead Boy Detectives” was the second most watched show the first week, but by week three, it was only the seventh most watched on the platform. The ranking compares it to other shows on the same platform. Netflix was competing against itself and despite “Dead Boy Detectives” being a top ten show, it simply could not keep up.
“Dead Boy Detectives” is just a show though, they come and go. Not every great show gets that next season. So why care about this one? It’s the LGBTQIA+ representation. Netflix has a reputation for canceling shows with gay representation and this show had a good amount of it. There is no evidence that Netflix made this decision due to the representation, however it is only fair for people to connect these two ideas. Netflix has many popular shows currently out with much more explicit LGBTQIA+ representation. Although this show may not have been canceled for that reason, fans have taken notice of this pattern.
Perhaps Netflix is just greenlighting too many shows. There are countless new Netflix original shows that come out every year and they all have to compete against each other. The company may just be producing too much content for them to commit to more than one season of each. Maybe this is a sign that Netflix is not doing that well as a company. With each canceled show, fans seem to be losing faith in Netflix’s ability to provide consistent content.
