The bigwigs at Netflix have claimed that such things as engagement, completion rate, and its dual-pronged viewership metrics are key factors behind which shows get renewed and which ones are placed on the chopping block, and that naturally raises some questions about Savage Beauty.
According to What’s On Netflix, the South African crime thriller has been awarded another run of episodes, despite the numbers hardly indicating that it was worthy. By Netflix‘s own measurements, the show spent two weeks in the global Top 10 after premiering in May of last year, and only entered the Top 10 in 14 countries worldwide, which hardly screams “smash hit.”
Regardless, the revenge-driven story following an invisible and ruthless force (otherwise known as Rosemary Zimu’s Zinhle Manzini) returning to wreak havoc on the married couple and wealthy businessfolk who’d tested a toxic product on a group of street children 15 years previously will be back.
The darkness threatens to consume her as she embarks upon a rampage, but there’s inevitably conflict found along the way as she wrestles with the meaning of her retribution. Savage Beauty is by no means a bad series, but handing season 2 to an in-house exclusive that barely made a splash on the most-watched rankings while canning plenty of others that did continues Netflix’s maddening methodology for deciding what lives and dies by its hand.
Maybe season 2 will return bigger, badder, and better than ever before, but at the very least you’d hope it manages to improve upon the performance of its predecessor to justify the investment.