Hulu has some original shows, but the streaming service isn't known to delve in that realm like their competitors, which makes its cancellation of Castle Rock season 3 (and beyond) a bit concerning, especially since it's happening during a peak of people adapting Stephen King work.
While Amazon Prime can hang their hat on many shows, including the brilliant resurrection of The Expanse, and Netflix can do the same with about a billion programs, Hulu has few original shows people enjoy to the point it would cause them to dump another steaming service for theirs.
To be clear, Hulu itself is a quality streaming platform. The no-ads plan more than makes up for the majority of the other issues. Nonetheless, cancelling Castle Rock should concern subscribers, as it hints to certain ideas as to how the service might work moving forward.
Netflix's system of cancelling shows after two or three seasons is well known by now. The basic idea is simple: The only way to lure in new subscribers is with new shows. While keeping the same old shows might keep loyalists around, they're not leaving when good programs like Travelers gets the boot. Instead, the focus is on growth — as if the exponential growth model hasn't failed a billion times over — through new and mostly only new content.
Is that what Hulu is doing here after Castle Rock season 3 failed to come to fruition?
It's honestly hard to say. Speaking only for myself, I originally only got a Hulu account for Castle Rock, as I am a Stephen King fanatic. Now that the show is not renewed for a third season, am I going to cut bait with the service?
Eh… probably not. While there's not a ton of quality original programming (there are exceptions, of course), the service itself is otherwise great and the backlog of old shows/movies and new shows/movies is pretty impressive, especially at the pice to consume them compared to Netlfix and its forever rising costs.
Here's where I, possibly an unreliable and bias narrator, have real issues. Castle Rock, as a show, might be severely flawed in areas, but it was also excellent and entertaining in others. Season one was excellent and the second season did a remarkable job of building a new universe and lore inside one as deep and already rich as the one gifted to creators by Stephen King. The show was connected to his books, but not reliant upon them for everything, allowing for some world building outside of the King-verse purview.
The show was not insanely scary; though it was refreshing to learn more about characters directly or indirectly involved in King's books. It was a show giving King lovers plenty of Easter Eggs to find, as well as quality storytelling in the process. And now, it's gone… because someone at Hulu with an algorithm at their disposal decided the cost to produce another season outweighed the benefit of having a flagship show for its platform.
Honestly, that was likely the show's biggest failure, even if it was no fault of its own. Hulu already has a flagship show in The Handmaid's Tale. After that, while it's likely hard for casual subscribers to name another original program on the entire platform, Castle Rock had little to no value to the streaming service.
While most every platform, producer, director and person with any sane business mind is attempting to connect themselves to Stephen King in every possible way (Peakcock is doing a masterful job right now with Mr. Mercedes), Hulu decided it was time to pull the plug on a flawed show with a brilliant premise.
If the wiggle room for error for shows on a platform like Hulu is next to none, it won't be the service that pays the cost, it will be the subscribers, who will instead be forced to see programs they love go extinct in the name of an exponential growth model that's as dangerous as Annie Wilkes.
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