You Had One Job, Starz ...

... and that job was to tell a story that had an ending.

I'm a big fan of Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods (not an affiliate link), and just as big a fan of the Starz TV series (available to stream "free with ads" on Tubi), which ran for three seasons before ending in a "cliffhanger" without finishing the whole story.

With a novel/show/story like this (one that has a beginning and an ending), there shouldn't be any question of "renewing after each season." You either make the fucking show, or you don't.

If you do make the show, it should start with (metaphorically, anyway) "once upon a time" and finish with "the end," not with "yeah, we know we need a few more episodes to wrap things up, and we know that this show is going to continue making us money from streaming revenues forever no matter what we do, but screw the viewers who pay us every month o and the 'free with ads' viewers who watch after we 'syndicate' it, we're moving on to other things instead."

Just to be clear: I am not complaining about the show. It's very well-made, it tracks the novel well but goes down some alternate plot lines that make a lot of sense, and the people who actually made it ended it as best they could under the non-renewal circumstances. If you haven't watched it, you should.

Rotten Tomatoes agrees with my general assessment -- the show's first season got a 92% rating, and while the second season fell to 61%, the third season surged back to 79%. I suspect beginnings and endings tend to be more popular than middle segments, which the second and third season are.

What I'm complaining about is studios'/services'/networks' approach to whole stories. Sure, renew an episodic comedy or dramedy or action show by the season. But if you've got a full story -- beginning, middle, ending -- commit to making that whole story or turn it down and let someone else do it.

I wish Neil Gaiman had presented the deal that way: "I've got the whole novel. I've got treatments for every episode of the show and can have first-draft scripts (adjustable when it reaches shooting script stage) for those episodes by the time we start shooting. Here's how many episodes it will take to tell the story. Here's how much I'm willing to accept for the rights to the story, but the contract stipulates that the whole story gets made. If not, you pay me a kill fee of four times the original price and release the rights to me so I can continue making it elsewhere. In fact, we should just start shooting and stop shooting when the whole thing is in the can, instead of taking long 'season' breaks, even if you release it in 'season' chunks."