Ransom Canyon may be #1 on Netflix’s top 10 list right now, but in the larger context of the show and the service, its performance leaves something to be desired.
As part of a growing trend, Ransom Canyon season 2 has suffered a 43% drop in views and a 54% drop in viewing hours compared to the first week of season 1 of the show. This time, it’s not clear that this can even be fully blamed on a lengthy break between seasons, where some shows take 2-3 years to return. Ransom Canyon season 1 debuted in April 2025, just a year and four months ago. That’s not bad, in the current state of things.
Only rarely do we see shows increase their viewership in their second seasons, but with so many Netflix shows produced each year, it’s more noticeable than on most other services. NetflixandChiffres.com has a chart showing how often this happens, whether it’s big shows or small ones.
The 43% drop for Ransom Canyon is similar to The Night Agent season 2 (down 40%), Running Point (down 45%) and A Man on the Inside (down 50%). Sometimes this is utterly disastrous, like FUBAR crashing a full 77% from season 1 to season 2. That show did…not survive.
This drop does not mean Ransom Canyon is doomed, however. Many of these shows do get renewed despite these big drops, including the three similar ones above and others like Wednesday and The Diplomat, as this happens to even some of the biggest series on the service. If Netflix cancelled a show every time one saw a 30%+ viewership drop between seasons, it wouldn’t have many left.
One factor that some have cited about Netflix’s issue with this specifically is that the binge model causes a very fast fading of many shows, especially non-hugely viral ones, from audiences’ collective memory. An entire season of Ransom Canyon is dropped at once, can be binged in two days, and is gone for a year and a half. A normal show would air for 2-3 months if it was on a weekly cadence. Still, there’s just a general attention-span problem with audiences, and much of it may have to do with the sheer amount of content Netflix and other services pump out. Even doing this for a living, I find myself putting off new seasons of shows I did actually like, One Piece and Avatar: The Last Airbender most recently, just because there’s so much else to watch and keep up with.
Judging by the last few years, this does not seem likely to change any time soon. Not that all these shows are getting the axe, certainly, but it’s a growing problem that Netflix and other streamers need to figure out how to address, or at least stem the bleeding.
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