'Marco Polo' Gets Rare Netflix Cancellation. Will Others Follow?

It's not often that a Netflix original series gets the rug pulled out from under it, but that's what happened to Marco Polo this week. The expensive period adventure became the first Netflix series to get the axe after only two seasons.

Marco Polo came to Netflix from Starz, where it was not performing well enough to justify its big production budget. We have no way of knowing how well the series performed at Netflix, since the streaming platform very closely guards its viewership data, but we have to assume the cancellation means that it wasn't a hit for Netflix, either.

Still, it's been the Netflix policy so far to hang on to all of its original programming for at least three seasons. Presumably some of its other originals are not exactly blockbuster hits, either--does anyone watch The Ranch or Haters Back Off?--but thus far even the least exciting among Netflix originals, including Lilyhammer and Hemlock Grove, have received orders for three seasons before being dropped.

Although Netflix would like us to believe that it has endless resources for producing original content and that every one of its original series is a smashing success, the cancellation of Marco Polo, along with the recently announced endings of Bloodline and Longmire, might be a sign that the company doesn't have infinitely deep pockets and that its series might have to start living up to some minimum standard in order to survive.