The Night Agent was Netflix's biggest hit of 2023, racking up 20.6 million views and 168.7 million hours watched in its first week. Season 2 saw a 32% decline. Now Season 3 has crashed by nearly 60% from the premiere, down to just 8.4 million views.

That's not a decline. That's a collapse.

Yes, audience drop-off between seasons is normal. Shows lose viewers. Not everyone who watches a pilot makes it to season three. But a 59% plummet from your opening season is catastrophic, especially for a show Netflix heavily promoted and renewed rapidly.

So what happened? Did the show suddenly get worse? Did people forget it existed? Or is this about something bigger—like audiences finally getting tired of the Netflix formula?

You know the formula: slickly produced, mildly engaging, algorithmically optimized for maximum binge-ability and minimum risk. The Night Agent is competent thriller television. It has twists. It has action. It has attractive people in expensive clothes running around Washington, D.C. But it has no voice, no specificity, no reason to exist beyond filling your evening.

It's the TV equivalent of airport fast food. It'll do the job, but you won't remember eating it.

Netflix has perfected this approach: Create content that's just good enough to keep you watching but not so distinctive that it risks alienating anyone. The problem is that this strategy produces short-term engagement at the cost of long-term loyalty. People watch these shows once and forget them.

Look at the numbers. The Night Agent Season 3 appeared in only 50 countries' top 10 lists, compared to 92 countries for Season 1. The show isn't just losing viewers—it's losing geographic reach. That suggests global fatigue with this kind of content.

Meanwhile, shows with actual point-of-view—Beef, The Bear, Shogun—generate sustained conversation and rewatches. They're culturally sticky in a way that algorithm-friendly thrillers aren't.

Netflix will likely cancel The Night Agent soon, if they haven't already decided. The company is ruthless about cutting shows that don't hit metrics. Which means the creative team behind it will scatter to create other mildly engaging, instantly forgettable series that follow the same formula.

This is the streaming paradox: infinite shelf space has led to maximum homogeneity. When you're optimizing for the broadest possible audience, you end up with content that's designed not to offend, challenge, or stick with anyone.

There's a reason Breaking Bad and The Sopranos are still in the cultural conversation decades later, while most streaming shows vanish from memory within weeks. Distinctive beats forgettable. Always has, always will.

In Hollywood, nobody knows anything—except that playing it safe might be the riskiest strategy of all. The Night Agent's viewership collapse is the data proving it.