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Thank you! Now, on to the article…
Post Warner Bros./Paramount Skydance merger, it seems like the big story that everyone (Really, everyone?) around town is talking about is antitrust. But “antitrust” can be an imprecise, limited term—to be clear, I’m referring to myself when I say this—mainly focused on price-fixing, monopolies, and cartels. This is why I variously write “pro-competition” or “pro-market” when I write about Hollywood’s competition problems, because there are a whole range of anti-competitive behaviors that harm markets and consumers.
So while people are (rightly) focused on further entertainment industry consolidation, I’m just as worried about other things, like app store fees, vertical integration extracting rents from talent, fraudulent advertising impressions, using platform discovery as a negotiation tactic, digital disruption allowing “Hollywood accounting” to take even more from talent, and countless other problems.
This list includes deficit-financed spending, or, in plain English, when companies spend and spend and spend to gain market share without worrying about making money. Today, that means the tech companies. Sure, traditional Hollywood also tried to play the “lose money to build a streamer” game, but they have mostly stopped, because they ran out of money.
Well, after compiling the TV show flops, bombs and misses today, I’m thinking a lot about deficit-financed spending.
That’s the topic for today: TV show flops, bombs and misses in the second half of 2025. (You can find the films recap here. If you want to read the full methodology for how I assemble this list, it’s at the bottom of that article.) In short, this list is…
…scripted and unscripted TV shows,
…from the major streamers,
…in the US (using US-only ratings),
…excluding true crime, kids and foreign-language shows,
…that got no/poor ratings,
…from Jan-2025 to the end of June-2025.
Reminder: this article does not represent my personal opinion—many of these shows are great!—but I follow the data, and a miss is a miss and a bomb is a bomb. (Find my definitions here.) Also, price matters. If a TV show costs north of $100 million, it needs to get lots and lots of streaming viewership to justify that budget. As with past editions, I ordered this list by streamer, going from best (fewest flops) to worst (the most misses), taking the size of the flops into consideration.
So keep reading to find out which shows flopped or missed by streamer including…
- …how few IMDb votes most Tubi shows get…
- …how many “Quibis” Apple might have spent in just six months…
- …whether Disney+ and Hulu are pulling their weight…
- …what genre isn’t working on Disney+…
- …what two streamers made TV shows in a controversial country, but got little blowback for this choice…
- …what notable video game TV show and comic book TV shows flopped…
- …which one of Netflix’s most important TV shows flopped…
- …and a whole lot more.
Tubi
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