The 'It’s Not Like That' star took to Instagram to express his 'disappointment' over his show’s axing despite a six-week run in the Prime Video Top 10. But his selfish demand for creative continuity completely ignores the emotional toll on the data scientists who had to pull the plug.
I opened my Instagram feed on Wednesday afternoon to a truly chilling sight: an actor expressing a genuine, unfiltered human emotion. There was Scott Foley, staring into the camera, having the audacity to announce he was "just disappointed" that his Prime Video drama, "It’s Not Like That," was canceled after a single season. He cited the show's six-week residency in the streamer’s Top 10. He thanked the fans. He looked sad. And honestly, it made me sick to my stomach.
Foley, bless him, is an actor. He still thinks in outdated, provincial paradigms like "people watching the show" and "audiences enjoying the story." He simply does not understand that to a modern streaming conglomerate, a television program is not art. It is a loss-leader for a retail shipping ecosystem.
I happened to be sharing a $48 endive salad at the Polo Lounge with a senior Amazon data strategist when Foley posted his little video. My companion actually had to put down their fork, their hands visibly shaking. The sheer ingratitude of it all was overwhelming. The studio gave Foley a massive global platform, and all he gave them in return was a sustained, highly engaged audience over a month and a half. In 2024, that simply isn't enough to justify the server space.
Foley keeps clinging to this "Top 10" metric as if it means anything. But as anyone who actually reads the trades knows, raw viewership is a vanity metric for narcissists. What a tech giant needs to see is cross-platform synergistic conversion. Did watching "It's Not Like That" make viewers mathematically more likely to subscribe to Ring doorbell cloud storage? Did Foley's tearful monologue in episode four drive a measurable, localized spike in bulk purchase orders of Kirkland-brand equivalent dog food? The algorithm looked at the data, and the data said no.
We gave Scott a tremendous runway, but at the end of the day, his character’s emotional journey simply did not compel our target demographic to upgrade their Prime shipping tier.
The discourse surrounding streaming cancellations is always so aggressively hostile to the platforms. We demand endless premium content, but the moment a trillion-dollar logistics company quietly euthanizes a beloved character drama to free up homepage bandwidth for Thursday Night Football promotional banners, suddenly everyone is a victim. No one stops to ask how hard it is for a Stanford MBA to look at a spreadsheet of millions of happy viewers and bravely hit the delete key.
Look at the rollout the reps secured for this show. The studio gave "It's Not Like That" every conceivable advantage. They gave it a thumbnail on the homepage that users only had to scroll past three carousels of "The Boys" spinoffs to find. They provided a generous marketing budget consisting entirely of push notifications sent to Alexa smart speakers between 3:00 and 4:00 AM. For Foley to turn around and weaponize his Instagram following after receiving that kind of bespoke corporate support is frankly beneath the dignity of the business.
Foley says he's disappointed. Well, I'm disappointed too. I'm disappointed that a veteran of the screen can't look past his own ego to see the beautiful, frictionless perfection of a tech company aggressively correcting a temporary surplus of human connection. I just hope the executives over in Culver City are taking the time they need to heal.