By anyone’s standards, Chambers died young. Just 56 short days after debuting on Netflix, it has now been consigned to the bin. “Chambers will not return for a second season,” Nexflix said in a statement on Tuesday. “We’re grateful to creator and showrunner Leah Rachel for bringing this story to us”.

Why was Chambers cancelled so abruptly? It could be down to any number of reasons, although they can probably all be boiled down to a) it was bad and b) nobody watched it. The supernatural thriller, about the recipient of a heart in a transplant who starts experiencing troubling side-effects, was unpleasant, listlessly acted (even though it featured Uma Thurman) and had a title so pointlessly nebulous that it literally could have been about anything, from bedrooms to courtrooms to toilets. All in all, Chambers’s demise was inevitable.

But the fact that it happened so quickly is still a surprise. This never used to be Netflix’s style. Quite the opposite, in fact; it wasn’t such a long time ago that Netflix gained a reputation as the least ruthless content provider around. This was the platform, remember, that gave three entire seasons to Hemlock Grove and Bloodline, and two seasons to Flaked. It was the platform that let Chelsea rumble on for 120 episodes. Nobody asked for those shows. Few people liked those shows. But Netflix renewed them anyway.

In fairness, it has got a little more ruthless of late. Now it doesn’t even wait until people are sick of its shows before binning them off. The abrupt cancellations of Sense8, Santa Clarita Diet and One Day at a Time provoked all kinds of appalled fan reactions. But still, hacking down a new show before it has a chance to find a proper audience seems quite callous.

Worse, it seems like the sort of thing Prime Video would do; the platform that gave Jean-Claude Van Johnson a splashy launch 10 days before Christmas 2017 and then cancelled 17 days after New Year’s Day 2018; the platform that launched Sneaky Pete’s third season in a blaze of glory on 10 May then axed it without a proper ending on 4 June; the platform that worked overtime to launch and cancel the second season of The Tick in just two and a half months.

Netflix has been this trigger happy before – Gypsy, despite starring Naomi Watts, was cancelled 50 days after it launched in 2017, and Friends From College was cancelled just 39 days after its second season premiered – but the abrupt cancellation of Chambers should make producers uneasy. This, it seems, is simply how the world now works. Netflix has such an overflowing glut of content that it’s basically float or drown. If people don’t find your show immediately, if it doesn’t inspire recaps and deep-dives and memes within hours of launching, it’s done for. A slow-burn word-of-mouth series simply cannot cut it on a platform that lives and dies by its ability to constantly serve up the hot new thing.

This is part of Netflix’s design. When it just had a handful of original shows, House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, there was more onus on keeping people interested with new episodes. But the platform now debuts hundreds of new series worldwide every year, which means it can be almost impossible for a struggling show to gain an audience in the face of such a tidal wave. Additionally, Netflix shows tend to become less economically viable after a couple of seasons – a report earlier this year suggested that renewal bonuses for third seasons escalate “sometimes from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars” – which can become prohibitively expensive when you’re dropping 600 new shows a year. In other words, new and cheap is better than old and expensive.

The argument exists that Netflix doesn’t actually cancel anything. Chambers – like Hemlock Grove, The Get Down, The Good Cop and All About the Washingtons and all its other weird failures – will exist forever somewhere within Netflix’s elaborate system of submenus, waiting to be discovered by an excited new generation. But that isn’t really the case. As soon as a show if officially over, it’s only natural for viewers to lose interest. I ducked out of Chambers after a few episodes, but now there isn’t a chance that I’ll watch the rest of it. If Netflix doesn’t have confidence in it, then nor do I. Also, it was really bad. I mean, my God.