Is Netflix Washed Now? – Sharp Text by Andrew Sharp

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Is Netflix Washed Now?

Friday, July 17, 2026

Al Bello/Getty Images for Netflix

Today’s headline poses a question you’ve probably never thought to ask, so I’ll start with my answer: yes, Netflix is washed now. The content on the platform has never been great, but it’s never been worse. I open the app these days and I’m amazed. What used to be a source of fun, buzzy, compulsively watchable, and occasionally excellent TV and movies is now an endless river of reheated IP, true crime documentaries, and filler dressed as prestige. Millions of people watch this stuff, and everyone instantly forgets it.

I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix content reaches a staggering 85% of American viewers and has 325 million subscribers globally. Growth is slowing, but that’s the law of large numbers. If practically everyone in America and much of the world is already subscribed to some version of Netflix, and churn rates are still low, then any concern is relative. Going forward: cable is still dying, and even if the biggest premium distribution platform in the world can’t make great content of its own, it can still license movies, TV and sports rights. Netflix can then spread those costs across hundreds of millions of subscribers and a steadily growing ads business, seeing more engagement in a week than Apple TV sees in a year.

So no, the company’s not doomed today or destined for collapse tomorrow. Instead, I think what’s interesting to consider is that Netflix has almost certainly peaked. As a cultural force, as a business success story, and as an entertainment death star destined to swallow Hollywood whole, the arrows are all pointing the wrong direction.

Here was Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg two weeks ago, writing about one of several problems the company has encountered over the past 12 months:

Netflix is struggling to get viewers to stick with its shows for more than a season.

One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season and another 35% for its third season. These figures are all through the first four weeks of a show’s release and come straight from Netflix.

Adding insult to injury, the latest season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of Netflix’s most-watched titles in 2024, suffered a drop of more than 60% over week one. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the month.

That report went viral, prompting a week of commentary on Netflix’s binge model and elongated release schedules, with lots of Twitter users observing that viewers consume eight episodes across a few days and then often have to wait as long as two or three years for the next season. By that point, memories of plot or characters are faint at best. The emotional connection to the story doesn’t exist. No one should be surprised that the audience for a show like One Piece is cut in half in 2026, three years after the first season aired.

While that explanation certainly feels true, Shaw followed up this week to note that data is mixed as to whether extended breaks between seasons do in fact correlate to audience drop-off. Severance, on Apple, gained a ton of new audience after its nearly three-year break. Stranger Things and Bridgerton have been multi-season powerhouses at Netflix despite their long breaks between seasons. Conversely, Tina Fey’s Four Seasons debuted on Netflix in May last year, was met with pretty good reviews, and returned 13 months later with half its audience.

I think the Netflix problem is more fundamental than production schedules. What if these shows just aren’t very good or differentiated? Consider the original productions Netflix has surfaced in the past few months:

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder

Running Point

Lord of the Flies

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen

Unchosen

XO, Kitty

Big Mistakes

Beef

Man on Fire

Little House on the Prairie

His & Hers

Nemesis

The Boroughs

That list is culled from a post by the Entertainment Strategy Guy charting Netflix originals that have under-performed in the second quarter of 2026, and one common thread between those titles is that I haven’t heard of almost any of them. Netflix is the one streaming service everyone subscribes to and is theoretically well positioned to be setting the cultural agenda, but that hasn’t happened for quite some time. Did you know that Avatar: The Last Airbender was a thing? Apparently that show lost 60% of its season one audience when its second season aired in late June.

Running Point is a show loosely based on Jeanie Buss, I know that much. Beef was well-reviewed during a first season I didn’t watch. Otherwise, I look at the list above and see a bunch of projects that may...