Despite Netflix having become the go-to avenue for comedians and their stand-up specials, the streaming giant will reportedly reduce the number of comedy specials it produces each year.
A new Bloomberg report states that the company will be scaling back big-time. It may already be happening. The platform has released 30 stand-up specials this year, which is already down significantly from the 50 they’d released this time last year.
Netflix has always been reticent to reveal viewing numbers, so we don’t know the actual reason for this. It may just be a budget thing, or it may be that the viewing numbers for certain specials aren’t as high as they’d hoped.
Expect the biggest names like Dave Chappelle, Ellen DeGeneres and the like to still get plenty of specials, but this might hurt the lesser known comedians that Netflix was previously successful at championing.
This news could knock the comedy world for a loop. Netflix quickly emerged as a great way to grow a comedy career, and soon overtook Comedy Central and HBO as the place to host your special. If the number of specials drops significantly, it could bring back those two outlets as major players, or allow another streaming entity to step in.
With the amount of streaming platforms growing seemingly by the day, there should be no shortage of avenues for comedians being cut off from the Netflix pipeline. But they continue to have the biggest reach, and this news will likely affect plenty of comedians.
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