Last week, we were notified of the grizzly news that Starz had cancelled Party Down. Sure, the cancellation was inevitable after Adam Scott went to Parks and Recreation and Ryan Hansen to Friends with Benefits, BUT STILL, we had our hopes for a third season. After the cancellation, Netflix offered us a meager consolation prize of 20 fantastic episodes to watch at any time. That allowed us to convince our friends to get on the Party Down bandwagon the same way they got on the Arrested Development bandwagon: late, but would help keep the show alive with a growing audience post-cancellation.
That was until this morning, when we saw this:
click image to enlarge
Starz is about to pour some scalding hot salt into our already raw wounds by removing Party Down completely from Netflix tomorrow. Before getting angry, my rational brain took over and said, “Calm down. This is probably a bigger Netflix-Starz deal that involves all their streaming movies and shows like Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Right?” My (very quick) research revealed that this is absolutely not the case. Spartacus will not be taken down soon, neither will Crash or any other Starz movie or TV show. In fact, of the 386 items in my Netflix queue, only two items have an end date: Party Down Season 1, and Party Down Season 2.
click image to enlarge
So why is Starz doing this? Are they hoping people will tune in to the channel to catch up on the show, or are they hoping this will increase sales of the DVD sets? Neither scenario is a win. First off, I don’t know a single person who watched this show on Starz. When I first discovered the show last year, I gleefully told everyone about it and part of my praise included the fact that you could watch it streaming on Netflix the same day it aired on Starz. DVD sales are down as well, so that doesn’t seem very logical either. So if the show is getting a 0.0 rating on TV, noone’s buying the show on DVD, and the digitizing fees have been paid for, why not leave it up? I can’t believe they’re losing money by having it on Netflix; if anything, they’re earning fans of the show. Last time we checked (prior to today), Netflix did not have an expiration date for Party Down, so all this must be some sort of behind-the-scenes negotiation that is not public yet.
Starz proved they were smarter than most premium cable channels by offering their programming through Netflix. It was an innovation that we are still waiting other pay cables to emulate (or a version of it). They were able to get quality programming to the masses that would normally have never watched Party Down (mostly due to a lack of access). This move though, is a major step back after previously leap-frogging over the rest of the pack.
I can’t wait to hear what Martin Starr has to say about this…because he’ll be right. So start the marathon now, you have fewer than 24 hours left.
UPDATE: Yes, it’s gone from Netflix Instant Watch. We will update our Party Down page if it ever shows up on Netflix again. Starz programming chief Stephan Shelanski contacted NYMag’s Vulture blog after they picked up our story to clarify the situation. He says the removal of Party Down is “a normal scheduling [change] like we do for all of our movies and originals. It’s done on a title-by-title basis. Party Down has been up for several months and it’s run its course — (but) it will definitely be back on our channels/on-demand/online services in the near future…. It’s taking a breather.” You can read the full update on the Vulture Blog.
