‘The Idol’ and More – Rolling Stone

The courtroom drama already cheated death once. It aired for two seasons on CBS, was canceled, then picked up by OWN for a third. But that appears to be the end, as the show is in the midst of airing its final batch of new episodes.

There were a few years where Robin Thede’s A Black Lady Sketch Show was literally the only show nominated against Saturday Night Live in some Emmy categories. Some of this was about recent Emmy rule changes, but it was also a credit to the work of Thede and her colleagues, whose fourth season was their last. 

Starz recently pulled the plug on multiple shows, including the wrestling drama Heels and the female friendship comedy Run the World, plus this excellent spinoff of the acclaimed film about friends and family struggling with gentrification in Oakland.

Technically, the Mayim Bialik multi-cam sitcom was canceled a week before the writers went on strike. But its timing is notable in a different way. Had Fox canceled Call Me Kat, relatively low-rated and critically panned, two years, or even a year ago, Bialik might have become the sole host of Jeopardy!, rather than splitting time with Ken Jennings because of her Fox commitments. But the strikes also resulted in Bialik stepping back from Jeopardy! altogether for a while.

This charming reboot of Neil Patrick Harris’ Doogie Howser, M.D. — this time about a Hawaiian prodigy (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) juggling a medical career and the complicated life of a teenage girl — ran for two seasons. This Doogie gets her nickname because her coworkers are fans of the NPH show, and there was talk of Harris cameoing as himself at some point. That won’t happen now.

The Game has had even more lives than All Rise. See if you can follow: the football-adjacent spinoff of Girlfriends (which began life on UPN, a network that no longer exists) debuted on the CW (built on the wreckage of UPN and the WB) in 2006 and ran for three seasons before being canceled. BET rescued the show and produced additional seasons that ran from 2011-2015. In the spring of 2021, a revival series bringing back some of the original characters debuted on Paramount+, and ran for two seasons before being canceled this summer. And while the original CW/BET run can be streamed on multiple services, Paramount+ has pulled the two newer seasons, and they are for the moment available nowhere. 

Speaking of both the CW and the idea of networks that don’t exist anymore, the CW’s new ownership has essentially turned it into a brand-new, much cheaper network, with a couple of holdovers from the previous regime being flanked by lots of ultra-cheap shows that originated in Canada and other foreign markets. So that meant bad news not only for Gotham Knights (a drama set in a world where Bruce Wayne is dead and others have to defend Gotham City), but for Walker: Independence, The Winchesters, and more.

NBC cleaned house on its well-reviewed but low-rated slate of sitcoms, with American Auto and Young Rock getting tossed alongside this charming hangout show about a group of Black friends getting together to drown their sorrows with glasses of wine.

Grease the stage musical has been a staple of high school productions for decades, has been revived on Broadway, and was even performed live on Fox back in 2016. But it’s still a product of the Seventies (including the famous 1978 film version with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John), and it seems there wasn’t enough nostalgic appeal to support a prequel series about how female gang the Pink Ladies came together. 

Hulu did the marvelous period comedy — starring Elle Fanning as an idealistic young Catherine the Great and Nicholas Hoult as her idiot husband Peter — no favors by dropping its third (and now final) season as a binge release in mid-May. It was meant to help get awards traction for Fanning and Hoult, but instead the season got lost in the wave of other cable and streaming shows debuting around the same time for the same reason. When no Emmy nominations came, it seemed to seal the show’s fate, and it was canceled in late August.

As angry as so many How I Met Your Mother fans get about that show’s ending, at least they all got to see the series’ titular event. Not so with its sequel series, starring Hilary Duff as a millennial looking for love, which was canceled after two seasons, before viewers found out which guy would be the father of the son we see her (in the form of Kim Cattrall) talking to in the future.

In 2021, Miranda Cosgrove and friends reunited for a sequel to the late-2000s Nickelodeon sitcom about a teenager whose web series becomes an unexpected hit. The new show did not manage to go viral, and was canceled after three seasons.

Where to even start with this mess that brought together The Weeknd and Euphoria boss Sam Levinson? How about a Rolling Stone investigation into exactly how behind-the-scenes fighting led to the show becoming the exact thing it was originally meant to parody? Or the way the show, about a pop star (Lily-Rose Depp) falling under the sway of a club owner (The Weeknd), was universally panned? Either way, HBO would rather everyone forget the whole thing existed.

You’re probably asking yourself how Inside Amy Schumer could have been canceled this year, when obviously it ended back in 2016, right? This is part of the problem. The sketch comedy series returned last fall, with Schumer finally making good on a fifth season renewal that had been put off for years due to other work, a baby, health problems, the pandemic, etc. Few seemed to notice the new episodes, and now they can’t see them at all, as this is yet another show to be yanked off of its streaming home to save its corporate parent a few bucks.

This adaptation of the iconic Penny Marshall baseball film won an adoring fanbase by recentering the story around characters who were queer and/or non-white. It just wasn’t a big enough audience for Amazon, which grudgingly ordered a four-episode second and final season just to allow co-creator and star Abbi Jacobson to hastily wrap up all the stories. Then the streamer used the ongoing strikes, and the uncertain production timetable they created, as an excuse to scrap the second season altogether.

Another show that jumped networks (from Comedy Central to Max), but also a bit of an ambiguous case. The day before the showbiz satire’s third season finale dropped, it was announced that this would be the end of the series, and statements were put out suggesting this was a creative decision. (Like how Reservation Dogs voluntarily bowed out after three seasons.) But Other Two creators Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider were subjects of an HR investigation about abusive behavior shortly before this. There were conflicting reports at the time over whether the two matters were related, or if this was always where it was meant to end.

The first season of this sci-fi drama from Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy cost a whopping $175 million. It reportedly wouldn’t have been renewed for a second if Amazon didn’t have a massive overall deal with Nolan and Joy. The strike ultimately provided cover to undo that renewal. 

Like The Game revival, this winning comedy, starring Sofia Black-D’Elia as a recovering alcoholic trying to put her life back together, didn’t just get canceled; it got disappeared. Only days after Freeform announced it would not be ordering a third season, episodes were pulled off of Hulu and On Demand platforms. To add insult to injury, Hulu kept running ads for the show for at least a few days after that, even though no one could watch it anymore.

How can you be absolutely sure that a show was canceled, rather than ended by the choice of its creative team? When the show in question is called Winning Time, is about the Showtime Lakers of the 1980s, and it ends with the team’s worst defeat of that entire era, followed by a rushed montage trying to sum up the rest of the story, then you know this was not chosen by anyone but HBO management, cutting bait on an expensive show that didn’t make a hoped-for splash.

This reboot of the classic Eighties series — this time focusing on a Black family in Alabama in the late Sixties — was clearly already in trouble when its second season order was for only 10 episodes (after 22 in the first), and when its premiere was pushed from fall to the following summer. So its cancellation isn’t a shock, even if it’s disappointing for an extremely likable comedy.