The pilot episode of HBO’s Vinyl was vintage Martin Scorsese, and that was the problem.

The story is set in New York (check) in the 1970s (check), opens with the lead character snorting coke (Bobby Cannavale, check), smash cuts to a slow push shot (check) of the character in a smart suit (check) tracked to a very New York-y voiceover (check), and the project had a big budget and big expectations (check and check).

In fact, it’s tough to understate just how big the expectations were:

The series had been in development for two decades.

The creators — Terence Winter, Rich Cohen, Mick Jagger and Scorsese — had the ideal pedigree for a show about sex, drugs and the New York music scene of the 1970s.

The Season 1 budget was an astronomical $100 million (and that’s not counting how much money they spent on marketing and advertising).

And the network desperately needed a critical hit. A premium cable network that built its reputation on prestige dramas like The Wire, Six Feet Under, Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos, HBO had not won the Emmy Award for best drama since The Sopranos in 2007. (Game of Thrones won the Emmy in 2016 after Vinyl was ordered to series.)

Vinyl‘s ratings started weak — about 750,000 for the premiere — and never improved. The season average of 650,000 viewers per episode was particularly weak compared to HBO dramas Game of Thrones (7.5 million viewers) and True Detective (2.6 million) and was on par with under-performer The Leftovers (700,000), which is ending after next season.

Shortly after Vinyl premiered in February, HBO got walloped in a deeply reported piece by The Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters for a long series of development failures, including a limited series from Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), a limited series about Lewis and Clark produced by Brad Pitt and Tom Hanks, and two different David Fincher series that were all shut down during production. Sci-fi thriller Westworld — like Vinyl, a big, ambitious and expensive series — shut down production in December for two months amidst creative clashes between the producers and the network (but is now on track for an October launch).

HBO renewed Vinyl in February shortly after the premiere aired but canned showrunner and longtime HBO hand Terrence Winter (The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire) and replaced him with Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) and Max Borenstein (Godzilla, FOX’s Minority Report series). The press release announcing Vinyl‘s renewal was brief and came without the usual “this is such a great show” quotes from HBO executives. The message: We’re renewing the series, but we’re not crazy about it.

Today — four months later — HBO decided not to renew Vinyl after all.

“After careful consideration, we have decided not to proceed with a second season of Vinyl,” HBO said in a statement. “Obviously, this was not an easy decision. We have enormous respect for the creative team and cast for their hard work and passion on this project.” Deadline reported today that the decision was not attributable to Burns and Borenstein’s plans for Season 2, but rather, implied that incoming HBO programming chief Casey Bloys made the decision to get his tenure off to a clean start. That makes sense to me: If you were put in charge of HBO, would you want a $100 million albatross around your rookie year?

So, back to what I said at the beginning: Vinyl was vintage Martin Scorsese, and that was the problem.

Variety cited “creative troubles” as part of Vinyl‘s problems, but that’s only partly true. The series scored a 71 on Metacritic with 25 positive, 14 mixed and no negative reviews. That’s about the same as Netflix’s Love, Hulu’s The Path, Showtime’s Billions, and FX’s Baskets, which are all critical successes. Critics actually liked Vinyl and, in particular, Bobby Cannavale’s performance as a record exec.

But there was nothing new about Vinyl; to state it less charitably, everything was old about Vinyl. The pilot plays like a serviceable, well-executed film that Martin Scorsese made 15 years ago and put in a time capsule marked: “Do not open until 2016.” The look, the themes, the voiceovers, the whole “let’s show people how rock-and-roll’s supposed to make you feel!” vibe — it’s all been done.

You know what feels fresh? Netflix, which is likely to dominate this year’s Emmy nominations.

Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Master of None all took interesting narrative approaches to their material and distinguished themselves from their creators’ previous work. When you add up BoJack Horseman, Lady Dynamite, Love, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, Making a Murderer, and on and on, you see the premium that Netflix has placed on green-lighting shows with distinctive voices.

Other networks are taking similar chances on younger writers and producers with big ideas. The showruners for USA’s Mr. Robot, Hulu’s Casual, and TBS’s Wrecked had a combined zero TV credits when their respective networks said yes to their shows. HBO took similar chances with Girls and Game of Thrones, which both have first-time showrunners.

None of which is to say that first-time showrunners are better showrunners, but younger writer/producers are revitalizing the TV industry by bringing unconventional stories and unconventional narrative techniques to the table that Vinyl simply lacked. Vinyl was neither on trend like Girls nor wildly popular like Game of Thrones, and a premium network that produces only a dozen or so original series a year has no room for a $100 million behemoth that does neither.