What does the cancellation of Netflix’s One Day At A Time mean?

Staff March 22, 2019

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Netflix has announced the cancellation of its original series One Day At A Time and the fans have reacted. Here we tell you why and what it means

What does the cancellation of Netflix's One Day At A Time mean?

In January 2017, two years ago, Netflix launched One Day At A Time, a sitcom about a Cuban-American family headed by a single veteran army mother. After its release, it had a positive reception from the critics and was gaining followers season after season. It is not, perhaps, a series with the same fanatics and the same hype as other Netflix: One Day At A Time was gaining its audience little by little, episode after episode, but those who watch it are true fans of this family. A few days ago Netflix announced that it would not be renewed for a fourth season. This caused a very strong reaction in networks from the fans, who started a campaign with the hashtag #SaveODAAT. Vulture even published an article explaining why this cancellation felt like a betrayal. Here everything you need to know about it.

Leer en español: ¿Qué significa la cancelación de One Day At A Time de Netflix?

About One Day At A Time

ODAAT is a sitcom in which we see a single mother, half Cuban, half American and veteran of the army, working every day to raise their children with the help of her mother. It has the performance of the great Rita Moreno as the family's grandmother. This series, then, stages a modern family. Even so, unlike other shows like Modern Family or The New Normal, ODAAT brings to the screen other types of problems with which the general public can identify more easily. For example, the ODAAT family is a middle-class family that must deal with problems such as children not being able to buy more than a pair of tennis for school, problems that are avoided in other sitcoms such as Modern Family, in which the uncomfortable problem with money is solved from the beginning.

This modern family, moreover, not only gathers strange characters to fulfill a quota of eccentricity or marginality (an immigrant, a gay couple, a rebellious adolescent), but rather demonstrates how these quotas have already ceased to be so as to become the day by day of American families. Thus, the series does not applaud itself for the diversity it represents on the screen but takes naturally the problems that an average middle-class family in the United States can experience. In this way, we have conversations about her Caribbean and Latin American heritage at the home table, debates about feminism, adolescents wondering about new sexualities and their own identity, a mother scolding her son for smoking marijuana and the son giving arguments, etc. ODAAT is not a self-satisfied series; it is, rather, a series that put on the table and on the screen the conversations that many families could have at their own table.

The cancellation as a betrayal

Netflix announced the cancellation of the series through its Twitter account. They explained that there was not enough audience to renew the series for a fourth season. Faced with this, fans on Twitter also questioned the streaming company and producer about the reasons why the series was canceled, as it had been widely acclaimed by the critics and embraced by an audience that, although it was not the largest, it was the most faithful.

We’ve made the very difficult decision not to renew One Day At A Time for a fourth season. The choice did not come easily — we spent several weeks trying to find a way to make another season work but in the end simply not enough people watched to justify another season.

— Netflix US (@netflix) 14 de marzo de 2019

In response to this, Vulture published an article entitled "Why Netflix's One Day at a Time Cancellation Feels Like a Betrayal", in which they explain how this cancellation is different from other of our favorite series. On the one hand, Netflix hides in the lack of audience, but Vulture wonders if it is really that there are not enough people watching ODAAT or if, on the other hand, there are not enough people subscribing to Netflix for this series (phenomenon that did happened with other Netflix hits such as House of cards). This is impossible to know given that the company has no obligation to make public its audience figures. However, the cancellation of the series is, without a doubt, abrupt.

On the other hand, the fans claim, the representation on the screen is a long and stony road. The idea of streaming platforms that work by subscription is to have access to content that has a massive diffusion, but that it also helps to spread another type of more independent and less commercial content. On this and after having thanked the cast and creators of the beloved comedy, Netflix said that the sadness that has caused the cancellation of ODAAT is proof that they must continue writing stories that represent the bulk of the population.

And to anyone who felt seen or represented — possibly for the first time — by ODAAT, please don’t take this as an indication your story is not important. The outpouring of love for this show is a firm reminder to us that we must continue finding ways to tell these stories.

— Netflix US (@netflix) 14 de marzo de 2019

However, this is being asked by the public behind Netflix. To the extent that what should motivate the construction of characters such as those of this ODAAT family is the representation of minorities on the screen, it would be expected that the public of these new ways of representing motherhood and family is also a minority, because it is what, in theory, it aims to: immigrants' children, for example, watch on the screen families similar to theirs and feel represented, with company. In this sense, it is impossible what Netflix asked its own series: a giant audience to justify it. We regret this cancellation, because it means the end of a new proposal of representation of the American family.