Whenever tv viewership went down. There’s a writer/producer on tik tok who worked on some big shows explains a lot of things and he said at some point when the viewership of tv went down advertisers paid less per ad so you had to show more ads to make up for that lost.

I think all your reasoning is pretty weak.

They can both look close enough to Geralt if you give him the costume and makeup.

The story they have in mind likely won’t fit a time jump.

Him being a fan doesn’t really mean much.

Plenty of people can play the role you don’t need to typecast Mikkelsen into it. It’s not like cavil himself was someone who was shown to be a stern, cold and mysterious before he got the role. People thought the actor was cool, he looked cool in the costume and are used to him. His actually performance as Geralt was generally seen as good but imagine if you used that argument against him.

It reminds me of how fans wanted Bryan Cranston to be Lex Luthor because he was bald and menacing in Breaking Bad. And Cranston himself criticized the idea of not being a great way to cast for a role.

For art people who like that stuff need to be willing to pull out their wallets. The problem with the general purpose streaming service behind a subscription is the people who appreciate the artsy fartsy stuff have weak voting power. With an a La carte model you can be like hey here’s my money keep making this. Under the subscription they are going to be looking for the show that’s both a crowd pleaser and an award winner opposed to just an award winner.

There can be a system where people who want to see “art” can fund these shows and it can be a good business. But I think what’s hurting it is this standard that everything should come as part of their subscription else they pirate or at least won’t pay. In other industries when there’s something that doesn’t appeal to the masses they call it a niche market and generally in these markets the people will pay a premium. I’m a super hero content fan and I loved the idea of paying $8 a month for a DC service because it was like here’s $8 a month make me only DC content opposed to here’s $20 make content that appeals to 200M people

It’s better than spending it on expensive shows hardly anyone watches.

A lot of people complain about cheap reality shows but if you can make a show for 1/10 the cost for 1/4 the engagement that’s better ROI. Plus, in practice some of these reality shows end up performing super well.

Yes it’s Star Wars but it’s not the style of show that usually gets very popular. Its also not even about characters that people strongly already care about.

Because things happened later on that made them regret it. Point is it's not about getting exacty past X hours total or Y viewers per episode because varying costs can outweigh the value. In Rome case, cost outweight the value initiially and they got strong DVD sales internationally that brought them additional value they weren't aware about at the time.

It being “incredible” is subjective and online reception means nothing. People shit on lots of popular shows online. Being in the top 10 is only one metric. There’s a lot more important metrics to take into account and one of them is cost. Neil Gaiman even acknowledged himself that the show is really really expensive and seems fine with Netflix taking their time to make sure it’s worth it. Another important metric is how many people actually finish the show and aren’t just starting it and dropping it because hours watched only hides that. You weigh viewership against cost and you make sure you look at all angles such as completion rates/speed. This isn’t exclusive to Netflix, a network TV channel isn’t going to renew a really expensive show that explodes the first episode than significantly falls by the final of the cost outweighs the value. HBO famously cancelled one of their best performing originals at the time Rome Because it was too expensive.