In recognition of Noah Centineo‘s status as one of Netflix‘s top young stars, he served as a SAG Awards Ambassador for the streamer’s January 23 awards show telecast. Ten days later, Netflix canceled Centineo’s series, The Recruit, after two seasons.
The cancellation was surprising in itself and in its swiftness; it came less than five weeks after Season 2 dropped on January 30. While Netflix rewards breakout newcomers with quick renewals – most recently comedy Running Point earlier this week was picked up for Season 2 just seven days after its debut – the streamer usually takes awhile for its cancellation decisions, analyzing the long tail of a show’s performance before making the call.
That leaves bubble series in limbo for awhile – for instance, we are yet to learn the fates of freshman comedy No Good Deed, which debuted December 12; and Heartstopper, whose third season dropped October 3. The cancellation after two seasons of another Netflix drama, Shadow & Bone, came eight months later, with impact from the strike a contributing factor.
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For The Recruit, there was a small red flag – its original Season 2 pickup, which matched the size of the eight-episode first season, was subsequently reduced by Netflix to six episodes. As a result, the writers, led by series creator and showrunner Alexi Hawley, had to condense the story, trimming some arcs and backstory.
Six episodes is very short and rarely seen for a U.S. drama series. (The Diplomat did it in Season 2, upon request from its creator and against Netflix’s wishes, returning to eight episodes in Season 3.) But there was also strike impact to consider, and an example of comedy series XO, Kitty not only surviving but thriving after a reduction from 10 episodes in Season 1. The eight-episode second season of XO, Kitty premiered two weeks before The Recruit’s second installment and the series was renewed for Season 3 a month later after netting an impressive 27.1 million views in its first three weeks. Coincidentally, portions of The Recruit Season 2 filmed in Korea, where XO, Kitty also was shot, allowing Centineo to reprise his fan-favorite role as Peter from the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before movies in the spinoff XO‘s second season.
The abbreviated second season of The Recruit was well-received, scoring 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, up from 68% for Season 1. Hawley also sounded upbeat about the series’ Season 3 prospects at the launch of Season 2.
“We’re waiting for Netflix to officially do their thing with it,” he told Deadline at the time. “There’s a lot of goodwill inside Netflix towards the show and towards Noah; I think they very much feel like Noah is a homegrown star, which he is. So I’m feeling super positive about it, as positive as you can feel in this town at this time.”
But it wasn’t to be.
In his reaction to the cancellation, Hawley recalled how Season 2 “wasn’t a sure thing” as completion for Season 1, shot during the pandemic, “was an early concern, ultimately overcome,” paving the way to the renewal.
This time, I hear the Season 2 completion rate was great; it was the decline on overall eyeballs that sealed the show’s fate. Launching a week after Netflix released Season 2 of similarly themed spy drama The Night Agent, which may have overshadowed it, The Recruit ranked No. 2 behind The Night Agent in its first two weeks and spent a total of three weeks before dropping out of Netflix’s weekly Top 10 rankings for English-language series.
Over those three weeks, The Recruit, whose second season featured a prominent Korea storyline and the addition of Teo Yoo to the cast, amassed 15.3 million views. That is 58% of the 26.4M views the show collected in its first three weeks of Season 1, when it spent five weeks in Netflix’s Top 10 under different methodology, based on total hours viewed.
For comparison, in its first three weeks, Season 2 of The Night Agent, which received an early Season 3 renewal ahead of its second season debut, amassed 36.6 million views. That is also 58% of the 62.9M views for Season 1’s first three weeks.
Of course, the drop was off a significantly larger base; The Night Agent’s first season remains in the Top 10 most watched English-language Netflix series of all time. Still, the action drama may also have been impacted by The Recruit as its retention for the first week of Season 1, ahead of Noah Centineo series’ arrival, was higher at 66%.
It is unclear why Netflix chose to schedule The Night Agent and The Recruit – two sophomore spy series with twentysomething male protagonists who are both idealistic CIA novices learning the craft as they go – back to back. (The Recruit‘s timing may have been influenced, at least in part, by cast’s option’s end date.) Having them run side by side may have created confusion, with viewers possibly getting their fix with one spy show (more likely The Night Agent) and not eager to watch another right away.
While both series may have been affected by the scheduling, the more comedic of the two, The Recruit, was also the more vulnerable. It was already trying to overcome a more than two-year gap between seasons, which, given the show’s generic title, may have led casual fans to forget about it. (The devoted ones did not, rewatching the first season ahead of Season 2 to send it back into the Top 10 for two weeks, something Netflix likes to see for returning series.)
The Recruit also did not get the level of promotional support given to The Night Agent, which faced a slightly smaller gap between seasons (22 months), as a Top 10 Netflix series.
The Night Agent‘s Season 2 marketing push included a big skydiving stunt by star Gabriel Basso during Netflix’s highly watched Christmas Day NFL games. The streamer also organized a glitzy premiere event in New York, which was canceled at the last minute in the immediate aftermath of the L.A. wildfires.
Meanwhile, there was no major campaign or red carpet premiere for The Recruit Season 2. (Because of the proximity of their release dates, the two series shared a press junket on January 13 in New York in conjunction with The Night Agent’s planned premiere, which featured two actors for The Recruit and five actors and creator Shawn Ryan for The Night Agent.) The Recruit‘ biggest promotional weapon was probably Centineo, who has a huge social media following. It may have helped, though a large swath of his followers may be fans of his work in To All the Boys and other rom-coms who wouldn’t necessarily watch The Recruit.
It was left largely to the Netflix algorithm to put The Recruit in front of the right viewers, which may not have worked flawlessly. A reader of Deadline’s cancellation story shared in the comments that they had just discovered the show last week and were bingeing Season 1 and enjoying it when they heard about the cancellation, with the news prompting them to abandon it.
Besides the similarities in the genre and protagonist, The Recruit and The Night Agent have something else in common: Both are produced by an outside studio, Lionsgate Television and Sony Pictures Television, respectively. They both have broadcast-type budgets that are more modest than typical Netflix dramas.
I hear The Recruit costs around $5M an episode to make after tax breaks, which is very reasonable for a high-end streaming drama. That should’ve made the series a viable renewal proposition even with the viewership drop as Netflix bases its pickup decisions on cost vs. performance (along with creative vision). There is an additional factor: Since Netflix famously pays “cost plus” license fees, covering a show’s production costs plus a premium of 30%+ of that, a six-episode season of The Recruit would cost 60% that of a comparably budgeted season of The Night Agent, which produces 10 episodes. (Outsized hits like The Night Agent are entitled to additional monetary incentives.)
Despite those apparent positives, there doesn’t seem to have been much of deliberation over The Recruit’s future judging by the quick cancellation.
Even with the year-to-year drop, The Night Agent‘s Season 2 viewership over the first three weeks was still larger than that for the first three weeks of The Recruit’s first season, which got a renewal, so shows like The Night Agent and Monster, which also was renewed for Season 3 after a Season 2 ratings slide, have enough cushion until the declines become an issue for the Netflix powers that be, especially as series become more expensive after Season 3 with escalating payments under the streamer’s model.
Lionsgate TV started producing The Recruit after Season 1, following its acquisition of the series’ original studio, eOne, in December 2023.
As an outside studio, Lionsgate TV could theoretically move a show from one platform to another. The company did it with Minx after it was canceled by Max, finding a new home at corporate sibling Starz. Or getting a Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist movie on Roku after the series’ cancellation by NBC.
Don’t expect that to happen with The Recruit. Netflix has what are arguably the most restrictive licensing terms that include exclusive global rights to the existing seasons for about 10 years and a ban on producers shopping new seasons for two to three years after the show’s cancellation by Netflix.
The only notable exception has been One Day At a Time, from Sony TV. A shorter moratorium on a linear sale allowed Sony to get a Season 4 pickup by cable network Pop soon after the multi-camera comedy was canceled by Netflix after three seasons.
Lionsgate would undoubtedly love to continue The Recruit, which comes from one of its top showrunners in Hawley, creator/executive producer of ABC’s The Rookie, but I hear the studio doesn’t see a path forward without Netflix making major concessions, which is highly unlikely.
The only feasible option may be what Hawley floated in his letter to fans after The Recruit’s cancellation. “Is two seasons and a movie a thing?” he wrote. “Cause we’d all be there in a heartbeat.”
While considered a very long shot, Netflix ordering a Recruit movie with Centineo, whose early career was built largely by starring in Netflix films, would make sense.
While rare, the move wouldn’t be unprecedented – in 2017, Netflix commissioned a Sense8 movie after backlash from fans when the streamer canceled Wachowskis’ sci-fi drama after two seasons. The Recruit‘s second season did not end with a massive cliffhanger like its first season – or Sense8’s second installment – but it left enough storylines open to set up a movie finale.