As the holiday weekend kicked off in the U.S., Netflix swung the cancelation ax and announced it was ending four of its comedy series.
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Netflix has announced that it is canceling Country Comfort, The Crew, Mr. Iglesias, and Bonding.
Country Comfort launched in March and starred Katharine McPhee as a down-on-her-luck country singer who becomes a nanny for a family of singing kids.
The Crew was the latest sitcom vehicle for Kevin James as the head of a NASCAR pit crew. When the owner of the racing team passed it on to his daughter, it fell to Kevin to try to keep her attempts at modernizing the team from putting his crew out of work.
Running for two seasons, Mr. Iglesias starred stand-up comic Gabriel Iglesias as a high school teacher.
Bonding rounded out the four cancelations. The series starred Zoe Levin as a psychology student who falls into a career as a dominatrix.
Netflix has been trying to find a breakout comedy for some time, and with a few exceptions such as The Ranch, most of their series are not lasting more than one to two seasons. Cracking the formula for sitcoms isn’t simply getting laughs, but getting enough people to watch week-to-week that they want to discuss it the following day. While the binge-viewing model has worked for Netflix for some time, sitcoms may be a style of television that benefits far more from a weekly schedule to allow word-of-mouth to spread more naturally.
