'I Don't Know How My Show Is Doing'

Streamers run on data, but that doesn't mean they're sharing it with showrunners.

- By Kathryn Vanarendonk and Josef Adalian

FOR DECADES, TELEVISION CREATORS had a pretty good way of finding out if their show was a hit: They could look at the Nielsen ratings, an imperfect, universal system for measuring viewership. Now that question is a lot more difficult to answer because, according to showrunners and producers, the platforms streaming their work share almost no data with them. Third-party measurement companies are springing up to fill the void, but without input from the platforms, they can't tell the whole story. This means the people who made a show may have little idea how big its audience is and even less of an idea about whether the streamer is happy-right up until the moment the show is renewed or canceled.

In a series of anonymous interviews, showrunners opened up about how it feels when your show's fate is a black box. (The platforms themselves declined to comment on their data-sharing practices.) To some people, it's liberating: They think tracking viewership isn't a showrunner's job anyway, and there was never a time when Hollywood decisions felt anything but arbitrary.

But to others, the data void adds an extra dose of anxiety-how are you supposed to negotiate without the numbers to back it up?

1 CREATOR OF A CANCELED NETFLIX ANIMATED KIDS' SHOW

THEIR MIND-SET WAS It's not about the number of people watching it. The thing we really need is for people to subscribe to the service, so ideally the thing that you make would bring in somebody who wouldn't have otherwise paid for Netflix. I thought, Well, that's cool! There's not very much stuff that's like the stuff that I make.