Prisma’s cancellation is bad news for all of us
The director and author of the series, Ludovico Bessegato, broke the news with a video on his Instagram profile. “The second season of Prisma will be the last, there will not be a third season,” said Bessegato who, in addition to directing, wrote the screenplay for the series together with Alice Urciuolo.
The decision to cancel the series by Prime Video, according to the director, would have occurred despite the second season having obtained a better response in terms of audience than the first: “I don’t have the official data – continued Bessegato – but I’m sure that the second season did quite well: Prisma improved its presence on social media, we were in trending topics with the official hashtag, the number of people talking about it increased, the actors’ followers increased”. In short, everything suggested that the conditions for a third season were there, but that wasn’t the case. The series, explains Bessegato, wouldn’t have done well enough to push Prime Video to finance its renewal.
“The platforms have changed and are experimenting less and less”
A choice, according to its author, that would explain not only the cancellation of Prisma but of many other television series of moderate success. “Series cost a lot and the feeling is that the policies of the platforms have changed – he explained – if before there was a tendency to look for experimental products that differentiated themselves above all from the series that air on generalist television, the feeling is that in the last two years the platforms are trying to broaden the audience to the detriment of more experimental products”. This kind of policy according to Bessegato would be legitimate on the part of the platforms, however as a creator and viewer he says he is sorry for the direction that the seriality market has taken in Italy. “I do not agree but I accept the choice (of Prime Video, nda), as an author, the challenge for the future will be to try even more to find a better balance between what the public asks for and what I am interested in telling. It is increasingly difficult but the challenge is up to us”. With a hint of bitterness, however, he explained to Bessegato that the public seems interested in simpler stories, perhaps with dynamics already widely explored rather than appreciating products, such as Prisma, in which an attempt was made, albeit within the framework of the teen-drama genre, to tell less traveled territories: the province, revenge porn, disability, gender identity.
Bessegato’s words have sparked a great debate online, so much so that even the very popular Film Updates account (which has almost a million followers on X) has reported the cancellation of Prisma. A petition has already been started online to ask that the series conclude with a third season, which has already been written; a similar movement of disapproval by internet users had already occurred a few months ago for the cancellation of another Prime series, My Lady Jane, which the platform chose not to renew after just one season.
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The general public is not interested in quality series?
Prisma had received excellent critical acclaim and, as Bessegato said, had gradually carved out its own audience of fans on an international level, as demonstrated by the attention that Film Updates gave to the case. Yet, as Luca Barra, professor of media and television at the University of Bologna, also points out, it seems that the general public is not interested enough in quality series. But is this really the case?
As we know, only the platforms know the real numbers of the series and at the moment there is no equivalent of Auditel for streaming content. Obviously, those numbers should be calibrated on the investment and, even here, it is difficult to quantify the success of a product if not from the data cited by Bessegato such as the sentiment of the network, the followers of creators and actors and the amount of discussion that a series or a film manages to mount on social media. If we use these parameters we see that in fact an audience for quality series does exist, just think of the success of Succession or the recent exploit after three seasons of Industry, both HBO productions. Or let’s think about the case of The Bear, a series that after just one season has entered the hearts of millions of people, winning numerous awards and transforming its protagonists into real stars. In short, the audience is there but you don’t have the numbers of the generalist one that watches, no one should feel offended, Emily in Paris or Bridgerton.
In a healthy market, both types of products should coexist, also because the most cutting-edge and experimental series also serve to find the stars of tomorrow: young directors, emerging actors and actresses, writers, but they also serve to experiment with the languages and themes of the stories. In doing so, the risk is to feed an asphyxiated system, without a future, in which the usual (very expensive) names divide up a cake that over time will end up becoming smaller and smaller.
In light of all this, the cancellation (hopefully temporary) of Prisma represents a dangerous alarm bell not only for the creative sector, but also for those who watch those series, that is, the public, that is, all of us.
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