News Star Trek Prodigy Cancelled, Season 2 to be shopped around

[Char Kais]

Did it have low views, though? Parrot Analytics suggests that PRO is regularly in high demand.

Article discussing the situation (updates?) Maybe news, probably nothing new: https://redshirtsalwaysdie.com/2023...odigys-future-paramount-season-2/?a_aid=46089

I find it ironic that people make fun of me when I post US Nielsen and Canadian ratings and dismiss them but are completely fine with headlines based on Parrot Analytics' data like "Prodigy’s second half of the season had a higher rate of engagement than Strange New Worlds" or when Prodigy writers post on Twitter that "The numbers are in — folks want more of our show!" and that Prodigy has an "Outstanding" demand.

More Prodigy hot takes:

"Prodigy’s second half of the season had a higher rate of engagement than Strange New Worlds" - redshirtsalwaysdie.com
"‘Star Trek: Prodigy’ Beams Into Top 10 Most In-Demand New Shows List" - The Wrap
"Contrary to Popular Belief, Prodigy Was One of the Most In-Demand Star Trek Shows" - reddit
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ousts Our Flag Means Death as most in-demand streaming show" dailystartreknews.com

 

[fireproof78]

find it ironic that people make fun of me when I post US Nielsen and Canadian ratings and dismiss them but are completely fine with headlines based on Parrot Analytics' data like "Prodigy’s second half of the season had a higher rate of engagement than Strange New Worlds" or when Prodigy writers post on Twitter that "The numbers are in — folks want more of our show!" and that Prodigy has an "Outstanding" demand.

Not really.

Data is merely discussion points. We don't have enough information to conclude one way or the other as to the business decision. Only idle, poorly informed, talking points.

And the Nielsen ratings? Only Picard Season 3 had those.

And finally, the data is never used to bash a franchise we're supposedly fans of.

 

[jackoverfull]

The point was, they couldn't produce an alternative female when Ishka was incapacitated.

not surprisingly: we’re still talking about finding someone doing something dangerous and illegal in a very small community (the ferengi on the station) where everyone knows each other.

And there was no sign of any of this in any prior episode. In the US, Susan B. Anthony and her crew were busy from 1866 to 1920, and that was just for the right to vote and hold office.

Apart from Pel and Ishka being around? We literally saw signs of it in every episode set on Ferenginar!

Indeed, but this only happened after the Church endured decades of ostracism, persecution, and frequent martyrdom.

Reminds you of anyone?

Again, not what happened. In the wake of female equality, Zek introduced taxation, welfare, universal health care, and an end to the Nagus's autocracy. Ferenginar was practically Federation 2.0!

My country has all that and I wouldn’t say it’s the Federation.

 

[Char Kais]

And the Nielsen ratings? Only Picard Season 3 had those.

Picard S3 was on the Nielsen Top 10 streaming charts, it doesn't have traditional ratings.
CBS did broadcast Discovery season 1 and Nickelodeon did broadcast Prodigy. In both cases, we have the traditional Nielsen ratings.

To believe that Prodigy has more engagement than SNW is beyond wild. Now that is completely laughable.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=/g/11jgz947g8,/g/11fl0mrc99&hl=en-US

 

[fireproof78]

Picard S3 was on the Nielsen Top 10 streaming charts, it doesn't have traditional ratings.
CBS did broadcast Discovery season 1 and Nickelodeon did broadcast Prodigy. In both cases, we have the traditional Nielsen ratings.

To believe that Prodigy has more engagement than SNW is beyond wild. Now that is completely laughable.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=/g/11jgz947g8,/g/11fl0mrc99&hl=en-US

Irrelevant.

 

[Sumire]

Nielsen ratings provide an interesting data point but they miss a lot. My husband and I were Nielsen viewers until earlier this year when our household hit the maximum number of months you can be with the program. (I believe I can speak about it as we no longer are participating so we can no longer be influenced.)

A few streaming services have tags on some programs that the meters can pick up but not the majority. We watch only streaming services. They told us they want homes with a variety of viewing habits so we were good to go.

You have to wear a meter to record what you listen to/watch. Do you know how many times I forgot to put mine on, sometimes until the evening? Or forgot to place it on its charger (correctly!) overnight? It was sadly not as uncommon as I would like. That seems to be a regular occurrence. They run sweepstakes every month to try to get people to wear their meters more. They do “wear your meter for eight hours every day for two weeks and get a bonus $10!” campaigns. They send out reminder emails and texts. They’ll even call you if you forget too long (I lost my meter at a convention once, found out I should have alerted them immediately and asked for a new one).

The meter tracks movement, even the slight movement of breathing, so they know if you are wearing it or not (plus it starts beeping if you forget it in your hoodie pocket hung over your chair). It’s pretty ingenious but the point is, Nielsen ratings are a lot easier to screw up then they were back in the old days.

 

[gvn2fly]

The streaming services don't need Nielsen ratings anymore though because they have the data for exactly how much views something gets...and down to much more detailed levels.

 

[Sumire]

True. However, they can release it as they see fit. The tags Nielsen can read on streaming, I believe even the statistics gained from those can only be shared at the streaming platform’s discretion.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Not much to say other than what has already been said in this thread. I am genuinely saddened by this news. Prodigy is a great show, with real heart and beautiful animation. Cancellation is one thing, but the creative team certainly does not deserve to have their work scrubbed from existence.

I've already got the Prodigy season 1 part 1 blu-ray; as things currently stand now, what are the odds of the rest of the show being released? I would really like to be able to complete the series on disc.

It won't disappear from streaming because this doesn't effect Canada, because Paramount sold distrubution rights to Bell Media who will likely still air season 2 and Paramount still has to honor that contract.

I very much hope you are correct. One of my first (admittedly selfish) thoughts after reading the news was, "But will season 2 still be on Crave?" (I would still of course feel bad for non-Canadians if it's not readily available elsewhere, though.)

If Paramount+ is in such a bad place it can't keep any of the Star Trek shows going, then it might as well just sell out to Amazon Prime or Apple TV+ right now, because they don't have much of anything else on the service that gets views other than the Yellowstone franchise.

Please keep Star Trek far, far away from Apple TV+. I would still like to get North American physical media releases of future seasons. Amazon is almost as bad, but at least with them, there's a slight chance. I can't think of many worse outcomes than Trek ending up on Apple TV+...

Perhaps it can be bought by Twitter and broken down in to ‘micro tweets’ of video content for blue tick subscribers?

... and yet somehow, you managed to. Congratulations, this is one of the worst hot takes I've seen on this board recently.

Things get memory holed (There are also many shows from when I was growing up in the 90s that has never seen the light of day now, like Seven Days or The Sentinal, to name a few)

While I agree that there are shows that have pretty much disappeared, those ones probably aren't the best examples. I'm not really familiar with either show, but some quick searching shows that both are readily available on DVD, at least in North America: Seven Days, The Sentinel

 

[tomalak301]

While I agree that there are shows that have pretty much disappeared, those ones probably aren't the best examples. I'm not really familiar with either show, but some quick searching shows that both are readily available on DVD, at least in North America: Seven Days, The Sentinel

And here I thought I was picking some obscure shows. I was looking at some other “obscure” shows that I grew up with and you can find almost everything on DVD or Blu Ray these days.

I hope the prodigy full season blu ray does come out. I will buy it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

True. However, they can release it as they see fit. The tags Nielsen can read on streaming, I believe even the statistics gained from those can only be shared at the streaming platform’s discretion.

The Nielsens give away the basic numbers of who won and who lost each night for free, and it's listed in the trades.

What the networks buy is complex analysis on those numbers, other numbers they'd kept hush about, and how the demographics relate to their own programming and the competition.

Streamers know who their own subscribers are and what they watch. It's %100 percent accurate, rather than using a statistical model and guesswork. The problem is that the streamers don't want to show their customers the real numbers, and their customers don't know if they are being bamboozled with fraud or not, while looking at what they are told are the real numbers, so they both need an impartial third party to create viewing numbers to facilitate the costing of an ad buy.

So the Neilsen group will sell data on any one to anyone, because if their customer gets less than the complete picture, then the fragmented data they did pay for, is meaningless.

The value of Neilsen numbers is that everyone gets the same numbers, so that no one can flimflam anyone else with sneaky lies about success or failure.

 

[herofhyrule]

https://twitter.com/goodaaron/status/1673094381304414208?s=46&t=TFYCcSFk5MWbyjOgXhPRkg
Looks like there's a chance we get the second half of S1 on DVD/Blu-ray.

 

[Danja]

OT: I led the campaign to bring the WB TV show Birds of Prey to DVD (it was cancelled after one season).

For six years, we were told, "It's over. It's dead and buried. It'll never see the light of day again."

We not only got it on DVD, it's now available for streaming on Amazon Prime:

Birds of Prey: The Complete Series.
https://watch.amazon.com/detail?gti...e5d-263552efbb7d&ref_=atv_dp_share_seas&r=web


My advice: Keep making noise. You may get a complete series DVD release out of it.

Prodigy is now a part of the Trek franchise. It can't stay buried forever.

 

[Avro Arrow]

It won't disappear from streaming because this doesn't effect Canada, because Paramount sold distrubution rights to Bell Media who will likely still air season 2 and Paramount still has to honor that contract.

I very much hope you are correct. One of my first (admittedly selfish) thoughts after reading the news was, "But will season 2 still be on Crave?" (I would still of course feel bad for non-Canadians if it's not readily available elsewhere, though.)

Looks like we might have counted our chickens too soon? According to Trek Central, Crave is showing Prodigy leaving Crave on July 24… along with most other ST series by the end of July.

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/star-trek-leaving-crave.314475/

 

[herofhyrule]

OT: I led the campaign to bring the WB TV show Birds of Prey to DVD (it was cancelled after one season).

For six years, we were told, "It's over. It's dead and buried. It'll never see the light of day again."

We not only got it on DVD, it's available for streaming on Amazon Prime:

Birds of Prey: The Complete Series.
https://watch.amazon.com/detail?gti...e5d-263552efbb7d&ref_=atv_dp_share_seas&r=web


My advice: Keep making noise. You may get a complete series DVD release out of it.

Prodigy is now a part of the Trek franchise. It can't stay buried forever.

I admittedly don't know a lot about DVD/Blu-ray manufacturing, but my thinking is, depending on when exactly the process started, Paramount could potentially have hundreds of copies laying around. Surely it would be better to sell those instead of just locking them away or destroying them? If Paramount aren't allowed to make profit off of the series, perhaps they could give them away for free at a convention or something. Would that be allowed? Maybe they're waiting to see if anyone else will take Prodigy first.

 

[Sakonna]

it's nice to know that the entirety of Season 1 will survive in the iTunes libraries of other people, instead of just the first half on physical media.

Again: I'm not SURE this will happen. The things that I have in my library that aren't available, but I can still watch, were not affected by anything like what's going on with PRO. So Apple may be able to delete it from my library.

iTunes will take away purchased content, actually. I've had it happen to me, stuff I was relieved I had forever because it was a purchase then vanishing from my library years later, with no way to get it back. I vaguely recall that maybe there was a lawsuit years ago trying to force Apple or Amazon to change the inaccurate "buy" terminology to "long term license" or something like that -- obviously, it didn't work out.

I do still have some things in my library that Apple no longer offers for sale. And I haven't even downloaded them to my actual computer. But I can still watch them.

So I can only assume that if I buy PRO now, and later Apple stops offering it, I could still watch it.

The stuff I had that vanished, before it vanished there was a huge interval of many years where it was no longer available for sale or rental, but I could still access it.

I THINK this was the way deals were done then -- users who have "purchased" will retain their ability to stream the content until X years after termination date of actual sales, along those lines.

In this increasingly brutal we'll-fuck-over-anyone climate, who knows if that's still the way it's done.

I have noticed that at least some of the vanished HBO Max shows remain for purchase/rental on other platforms, and no one was more ruthless in their chops than HBO Max, so that suggests there's time.

Is the writer's strike one reason it's being cancelled?

Since animation writers are in a different union that is not on strike, I was hoping for a minute the WGA strike would actually help Prodigy -- a Star Trek Universe show that can actually continue production!

 

[jackoverfull]

iTunes will take away purchased content, actually. I've had it happen to me, stuff I was relieved I had forever because it was a purchase then vanishing from my library years later, with no way to get it back. I vaguely recall that maybe there was a lawsuit years ago trying to force Apple or Amazon to change the inaccurate "buy" terminology to "long term license" or something like that -- obviously, it didn't work out.

you are misremembering: this literally never happened. Apple *never* removes your purchases from your local drives, they don’t even have a system in place to do so.
As I wrote above, though, things may not be available to download again. Also, I’m talking about the old regular iTunes Store, not their streaming services like Apple Music or Apple TV.

 

[Oddish]

I understand the ruthless nature of entertainment... as fond as we were of the show, it apparently failed to find an audience. I think it would have, given time, but television shows don't always get the time they need. It's easy to be philosophical about such things... until something you enjoyed gets the ax.

Be that as it may, I find Paramount's actions here thoroughly deplorable. Canceling a show is one thing, attempting to erase it from existence is another. At least stick it on YouTube like you did "Strange New Worlds"!

@jackoverfull - we should probably continue our discussion in a relevant topic.

 

[Sakonna]

you are misremembering: this literally never happened. Apple *never* removes your purchases from your local drives, they don’t even have a system in place to do so.
As I wrote above, though, things may not be available to download again. Also, I’m talking about the old regular iTunes Store, not their streaming services like Apple Music or Apple TV.

No, you just misread me. I’m talking about something different - the ability to stream it from the library of purchases. I wasn’t talking about downloads. The ability to stream already purchased content will (at least in some cases) last for years past the point it is no longer available for new sale or rental, then unpredictably vanish without warning.

It was probably through glitch rather than intentional choice, but Apple has deleted a chunk of downloaded podcasts from my device on 2 or 3 occasions. The key point being: Apple can do things that cause you to lose access to even downloaded media.

 

[trekfan_1]

Sorry if this has been mentioned. In Canada, Prodigy streams on Crave. Will this " gotta purge for tax wright off" thing effect its continuing availability on Crave?

And will season 2 need to be "shopped" to Bell Canada or other Canadian outlets or will it just be added to Crave as normal?