It has become increasingly a trend in the entertainment industry, the cancellation of already completed television shows as a cost saving measure so that networks can take advantage of tax write offs. It’s a strategy that Warner Bros. Discovery has employed by scrapping reality competition The Big D and the second season of Chad and, more recently, AMC Networks has employed with the cancellation of Demascus, Invitation to a Bonfire, and the second seasons of 61st Street and Pantheon, the latter two which had nearly completed work on their second seasons. Netflix also recently axed the second season of the animated series Inside Job and while this trend is growing more and more common, at least one showrunner is speaking out about the practice. Carina Adly MacKenzie, creator of The CW’s Roswell, New Mexico, addressed the matter in a recent Twitter thread, calling it a “direct betrayal of promises made” (via Deadline).
Saw a bunch of “it IS fair for a network to just decide not to air a completed TV season, because everyone who worked on it still got paid” tweets so I wanted to talk about some of the nuances of that.
