SFB’s Sense8 reviewer Alasdair Stuart reflects on Netflix’s recent decision to cancel the show and wonders at the message it sends…

If there is one element of human life where we’ve cracked immortality, its intellectual property law. Nothing really dies anymore, because sooner or later the IP trademark needs to be serviced. Death, just like in comics, is temporary. Cancellation is, not always but often, more a comma than a full stop. TV shows, especially genre TV shows, don’t so much end as they do pause for breath,

That’s cold comfort right now though. Last week, Netflix announced that Sense8 would not be returning for a third season.

There’s a lot to unpack there and that will certainly happen in the coming weeks. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has made some comments in particular that are either blisteringly stupid or speak to a Byzantine level of business understanding that borders on the four dimensional. Apparently Netflix have too many good shows and need to be cancelling more things and taking more risks.

I’ve spent some time this weekend trying to think of something riskier than an eight character, eight country show about an offshoot of humanity that is biologically and mentally networked and encourages fluidity of gender, sexuality and identity. Drawn a blank so far.

The simple truth of course is money. Because in the end the one thing that always kills art is one of the two things that sustains it. You can have all the acclaim you want but unless that translates into eyes on the work, bums in the seats and money in the bank that won’t matter. Sense8 was undoubtedly very expensive. It’s entirely possible it priced itself out of the market. Or at the very least was so good that it had to be cancelled. Somehow.

Hastings’ ridiculous ‘in order to save the village we had to destroy it’ valley speak and money aside though, there’s an indisputable air of bodge to this. Cancelling any show on the first day of Pride would be foolish. Cancelling a show that put LGBT issues front and centre and made them integral to the characters? The nicest read on that is that it’s stupid. The nastiest is that it was malicious and deliberate.

No art is apolitical. Even if, somehow, you make something which has none of your own implicit biases baked into it your readers and viewers will bring their own. This is the battle for authorial control that powers so much of genre fiction in particular right now and Sense8 is interesting for how it almost completely avoids that. The show is painfully, endlessly honest. We see Nomi’s struggles with her family. We see the price Lito pays for coming out. We see how Will and Riley manage a long distance relationship The show is absolutely political. But the show never lies about those politics and in the second season in particular puts them to use as an engine for character and plot instead of a soapbox.

Better still, the fundamental through line of Sense8 is one of the most hopeful things genre fiction has done so far this century. Separately, each of the leads is a whole person with a life and relationships. Together, they’re something much more. The show is at its best when it pairs the characters off in unusual ways and there are so many of those moments across the two seasons. Lito and Wolfgang chatting about how Wolfgang has manipulated his opponents using something very similar to Lito’s own skill set is a personal favourite. Lito’s ‘May I?’ before stepping into Wolfgang’s consciousness and acting him out of trouble is just a flat out joy. Likewise the Cluster on Cluster fight in the second season and the positively balletic action sequence that opens the final episode of the show to date..

But there’s one particular moment I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. It’s shortly before Lito decides to go to the Pride festival in Sao Paolo, to formally come out as gay. He goes to the bar he visited earlier in the season and orders eight tequilas. We see all eight Sensates, each holding a drink. They toast him and Cepheus says ‘Courage is contagious.’

I needed to hear that in 2017. I suspect a lot of people did and still do. It’s just a shame courage seems to be in such short supply at Netflix.