I can’t say that all good streaming services get canceled, because lord knows some people will never get rid of their Netflix out of a bit of FOMO, but I just hit a weird wall with one of my personal favorite streaming services of the year. I kept checking the app this morning, hoping that something would change. That a perceived wrong would be righted. It was not.
But let’s rewind a bit first. Back at the start of the year, I canceled Netflix because it simply didn’t have the stuff I wanted. What did I want? Well, I was playing catch-up on all the big shows that I needed to still see, and they had just lost Halt and Catch Fire, one of the more underrated dramas in AMC’s recent history.
Overshadowed by Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, and countless other Netflix shows, Halt and Catch Fire is too good to miss. That said, it’s an alternative history of the rise of the personal computer and the internet, which is a premise that some folks slept on. I was one of them, and I had even let it slip through my fingers when it was at Netflix, only starting the final season before mindlessly getting distracted.
And so I tracked it down to AMC Plus, an $8.99 per month streaming service that had Halt and Catch Fire, and then some. It even had Killing Eve season 4 episodes a week before they aired on regular AMC. I thought I was just going to have to keep “finding the room” in my budget for it. Which I would have done happily.
But then my most anticipated show of the year changed everything.
Streaming services create expectations
AMC Plus and I soon found ourselves in “fool me once, don’t fool me twice” situation. I returned to Netflix to watch Better Call Saul — the beloved prequel series to Breaking Bad that focuses on how lawyer Jimmy McGill became the sleazy Saul Goodman. Tom’s Guide has…