Netflix has no problem cancelling a promising series if it doesn’t pass their mysterious threshold of success. In fact, some shows look like absolute winners from the outside and still find themselves cancelled in the lurch after one outing on the big red app; success can be fickle like that. Heavy-hitters like “Stranger Things,” “The Crown,” and Bridgerton get to tell their entire story across multiple seasons. However, if you’re a new show, you better be the most popular thing on Netflix for at least a month to leave no doubt that you’re worth investing in, and that’s a hard bar to clear regardless of how good a show ends up being. It’s cruel, but reflective of the larger streaming business model that stretches far beyond Netflix’s door and into other fan-favorite apps, too.

As such, TV and movie coverage is now forced to swirl around the concept of “success.” Most headlines orbit ideas like “flops” and “bombs” instead of even discussing the content of most shows, and that makes it really sad when a series with potential is left collecting dust in the corner of a streaming service. One show that might qualify in a few years is Netflix’s “The Brothers Sun,” after the streaming juggernaut made the call to cut the story of Charles and Bruce Sun short.

“The Brothers Sun” was a Netflix comedy drama focused on a family of gangsters from Taipei starring Michelle Yeoh, Justin Chien, and Sam Song Li. Yeoh’s “Mama” Sun had sheltered her youngest child, Bruce Sun, from the family’s criminal dealings back in Taipei, but things come to a head when her other son, Charles, moves to Los Angeles, California, to protect his mother and baby brother. All three of them have to work together to keep the authorities off their trail and acknowledge their history from diverse angles.

Yeoh is a powerhouse alongside Chien and Song Li as her boys, and on the surface, this feels like the kind of show that Netflix easily could have gotten three or more seasons out of with little effort. But, that wasn’t to be as the streamer had to make way for the aforementioned heavyweights like “The Electric State,” which cost several times the budget of making just one season of “The Brothers Sun.” It’s a shame, as this show actually managed to get into the Netflix Top 10 during the week it released on the streaming service, and that’s not a guarantee for any series that has to exist alongside the veritable sea of content available on the streaming platform.

Simply put, the series was cancelled because there are too many mouths to feed in the current streaming climate on Netflix. “The Brothers Sun” boasts an 84% Certified Fresh on the Tomatometer and a 90% Rotten Tomatoes audience score, but those numbers don’t necessarily lead to an immediate renewal in the modern Netflix environment. It’s not enough for a show to have great critical reception and audience numbers, they have to be unquestionably the biggest thing on the app for more than a week or two to make sure that season 2 even becomes a reality.

Think about the fervor around “Adolescence” earlier this year, it was the most talked about thing on not only Netflix, but all of social media for about three weeks. All of that chatter directly led to Netflix negotiating for a season 2. That kind of cultural penetration is the impact that the decision-makers over there are looking for when they give a show multiple seasons at Netflix now, which is going to make it harder for shows like “The Brothers Sun” to break through in a crowded field that only gets more stuffed to the brim with each passing week. 

This is the depressing side of the coin that gets the majority of the coverage with streaming TV now, as executives are always going to throw their weight behind the most popular properties and only sprinkle that love on a few titles that don’t prove to be sure bets. (Netflix is the same place that surprised all of us by giving “Survival of the Thickest” multiple seasons in the same environment. And, that show is freaking delightful.)

Success and abundance always go hand-in-hand in our popular conceptions of entertainment, and sometimes real life does follow that script. But, in the era of streaming, the land of milk and honey that these platforms were supposed to provide gave way to a system that looks alarmingly similar to the old TV model that it replaced. As “The Brothers Sun” points out at every turn, success always has a price, and it just so happens that the viewers end up footing the bill.