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‘Sense8’ Cancellation Is Netflix’s Second in a Week

A scene from Season 2 of “Sense8.”Credit...Murray Close/Netflix

Is Netflix about to set forth on a cancellation binge?

A week after it axed “The Get Down,” its expensive single-season music drama, Netflix, the online streaming service, announced Thursday that it was canceling its sci-fi drama “Sense8” after two seasons.

By Netflix standards, this is a moment.

The company has been notoriously reluctant to cancel any of its original series. When the expensive but poorly reviewed “Marco Polo” got clipped in December, it qualified as a surprise to the TV industry. Netflix, to the frustration of many in Hollywood, does not release viewership figures, so it is difficult to tell what works and what doesn’t. Netflix has poured billions of dollars into original TV shows, and it has only canceled a small fraction of them.

But the company’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, recently suggested this was something they might be prone to do.

“I’m always pushing the content team, We have to take more risk, you have to try more crazy things, because we should have a higher cancel rate overall,” he said Wednesday in an interview with CNBC. “Because then, what you get is you get some winners that are just unbelievable winners — like, ‘13 Reasons Why’ over the last three months has been a big hit for us.”

He added, “Well, you can tell when we cancel a show,” an indication that viewership figures were part of the streaming service’s calculus, even if those figures were not shared with anyone outside the company.

“Sense8” was a globe-trotting sci-fi drama made by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, the filmmakers behind “The Matrix,” and J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of “Babylon 5.” It received generally positive reviews from critics.

“After 23 episodes, 16 cities and 13 countries, the story of the Sense8 cluster is coming to an end,” said Cindy Holland, the vice president for original content at Netflix.

She added, “Never has there been a more truly global show with an equally diverse and international cast and crew, which is only mirrored by the connected community of deeply passionate fans all around the world.”

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