Sense8 remains canceled; Netflix responds to season 3 campaign

More bad news is coming in today for all fans of Sense8 all around the world. While you may want to see more of the Netflix series, it’s just not happening. Given that the streaming service owns the show, it’s also hard to see it going anywhere else. The project, pending some last minute Hail Mary, seems to be dead.

Late Thursday, the show’s official Tumblr posted a message confirming that Netflix did consider picking the show back up after the petition, the phone calls, and all of the trending topics on Twitter:

We’ve seen the petitions. 

We’ve read the messages. 

We know you want to #RenewSense8, 
and we wish we could #BringBackSense8 for you. 

The reason we’ve taken so long to get back to you is because we’ve thought long and hard here at Netflix to try to make it work but unfortunately we can’t.

We will give Netflix a slight smidgen of credit for responding to some of the chatter, given that this is something that the majority of networks / services out there wouldn’t do; yet, that doesn’t make anything easier for the fans out there who were hoping to get a third season of this creative, inclusive, and immensely satisfying show.

With Sense8, it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to figure out the reason why the show’s canceled, and why it’s staying that way: Cost. According to a report from Business Insider, the series cost a whopping $9 million an episode to produce, making it one of the most-expensive shows on the air. The only current shows on the air to cost more are Game of Thrones and The Crown, which carry with them a ton of awards-show clout and, in the case of the former especially, a massive viewership. Typically, the longer a show lasts, the more expensive a show gets. Unless Sense8 was to scale back and lose its global appeal, it’s hard to see how that cost could go down. If it were to do that, there could be complaints that it wasn’t the same show anymore.

It’s one thing for a network to be charitable and eat a little bit of a cost to make fans happy. It’s something different when you’re talking about a show that, Christmas Special included, cost around $100 million for its second season. There are many big-budget Hollywood movies with a smaller price tag.

We will miss Sense8, and if it’s not on TV, hopefully it finds a way to wrap up its story in another platform like a book or a graphic novel. This is something that Firefly and some other canceled shows have been able to do.

If there is further news on Sense8 to report, we’ll have it for you over at the link here. (Photo: Netflix.)