AMC cancels 61st Street, tosses already-filmed second season in the trash
Courtney B. Vance starred in the series, which had already wrapped filming on its second season
Aux News AMC
In an increasingly (and depressingly) common practice, AMC announced today that it’s rescinding an already-granted second-season order for its Chicago-set legal drama 61st Street. This, despite the fact that the Courtney B. Vance-starring show had already filmed its second season, which will now, presumably, get dumped in the garbage, alongside all the other shows and movies that have gotten this treatment of late.
Admittedly, 61st Street—in which Vance plays a lawyer attempting to keep his young client (Tosin Cole) from getting chewed up and spit out by the Chicago legal system—wasn’t exactly burning up the airwaves with its ratings. The show logged about 159,000 viewers for its May 2022 finale, coming in below more successful network shows like Interview With The Vampire and Fear The Walking Dead. Which, we’d argue, would be a good reason not to give a series a big, fancy two-season order in the first place—and especially not to okay filming on that second season before you were sure people were going to bite on the first. (The pandemic played a part here; the series was initially meant to premiere back in 2021, but got delayed.)
The decision to dump 61st Street comes down, of course, to “cost-cutting”; it apparently makes more fiscal sense to just not air the show at all, rather than run it or or sell it to someone else, and just take the whole thing as a loss. Because while HBO has supposedly pledged to cut back on its buzzsaw practices to its creator’s work (including decisions to shelve whole finished films), there’s definitely a sense that a precedent has been set here where that’s an acceptable route to take with the hard work of the hundreds of people who come together to make a season of TV.
61st Street starred Vance and Cole, plus Bentley Green and Holt McCallany. The series was created by Your Honor creator Peter Moffat.
[via EW]
31 Comments
AMC: American Movie Cancellations
They also scrapped Invitation to Bonfire starring Tatiana Maslany even after filming four of the six planned episodes.
Good decision
less crap = good
The PeakTV bubble is bursting?
A new era of tv where renewels don’t actually mean anything anymore.
“a precedent has been set here where that’s an acceptable route to take with the hard work of the hundreds of people who come together to make a season of TV.”I mean, that was always the case. If they paid you enough to justify research, you could do a deep dive into a bunch of shows that had entire seasons filmed and weren’t aired dating back many decades. Or just do a quick slide show featuring “Heil Honey, I’m Home!” in a thumbnail to get some clicks.
I’m more surprised to discover that:1. AV Club is reposted to Yahoo Sports2. This counts as sports news.https://sports.yahoo.com/amc-cancels-61st-street-tosses-221500668.html
GOD. DAMN. IT.
I loved that show. Me and 158,999 other people can’t be wrong!
I’d never even heard of it but, regardless, pretty dick move.
Yeah, they should have just kept it going even though no one watches it
Same. This was, at least in part, a marketing fail. No one’s going to watch a show they don’t know about, and it’s not the 70s where people discovered a show because it happened to be on the channel (of a whopping total of 4) they happened to be watching.
I’m not defending AMC (or whatever owner’s conglomerate that makes their decisions), but from the perspective of the people working on this show, isn’t it preferable to make a second season that never airs rather than getting ourright canceled after just one? I assume they’re getting at least party paid for their work now.
All the crew members got paid. It’s anyone who was expecting royalties that’s screwed.
Below the line union workers also get residuals. Depending on the guild the residuals may pay into their health insurance or their retirement funds instead of money directly into their pockets, but everybody is getting screwed here, not just the producers, directors, and actors.
They just need to make series last for 1 season now with a true ending at the end. Because I’m hating this trend of a bunch of great series without an ending.
I think that was one of the factors that led to Korean television dramas being successful in the world market. Those companies would produce limited series of all types, like romantic comedies, crime stories, family melodramas, etc. which had a contained story within a certain number of episodes. They were sold to an international audience that knew they would not be risking watching a series that would leave them wondering what happened due to cancellation.
It had a pretty solid ending? Actually I thought the finale was almost too neat and tidy. I would have watched S2, but to be honest my favorite part of the whole thing was all the location shooting on the south and near south sides. The storytelling felt a little heavy handed to me.
Good news. Way too many blacks for my taste. Needs more diversity
“Yellowjackets will be fine…Yellowjackets will be fine…Yellowjackets will be fine…”
I have at least heard of ‘Yellowjackets’
I wouldn’t be surprised if in the near future we start seeing clauses being added to the contracts of big-name directors and actors, which require the work to be made available to the public. Something like “if we film this project you have to actually fucking release it.” Seems ridiculous that we’ve reached this point, but no one wants to work for months on a project just for it to never get released. That’s time you could have spent working on something that people actually get to see.
That’s kinda always been a risk for writers, producers, and anyone who has developed a project though. The studio could change its mind or the investors might disappear, throwing away months or years of work. As for projects that have actually been filmed, when low-rated broadcast shows have been cancelled in the past, networks often never aired the remaining episodes. To be clear, it sucks and it feels unusual for the age of streaming, but it’s nothing new.
Yea – in fact there’s an entire Wiki page of shows with episodes produced that were never aired:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_series_canceled_before_airing_an_episode
Just from scanning that list it looks like the overwhelming majority of the entries are pilots. Those are a very different case than shows that have produced an entire season and had it gone unaired, either partially or completely.
And a fair amount of the time the unaired episodes still get included on the home video release of the season.What we’ve been seeing with WBD and now this is extremely uncommon, and the guilds are getting really pissed off about it, because not only is it a year or more of work that is getting tossed in the dumpster with nobody to see it, it’s the residuals from that work that are getting cut off as well. And for a lot of people residuals are what get them through the periods between jobs (rumour is that the reason The Flash isn’t getting Batgirl’d is because several of the guilds threatened work stoppages for WB productions if they did it to another movie).
I’d bet money on there being more than one strike the next time contract negotiations come up because the guilds will want some sort of standard pay-or-play clause and the studios are going to fight them on it.
I clicked through and there were a bunch of shows that had more than a pilot created – there was an animated Star Wars show by Seth Green and others that had 39 episodes (2 seasons worth) of episodes produced that has yet to air (seemingly because of Disney acquiring Star Wars which is a similar situation to WB and Discovery merging).
It’s even more injurious to people just starting out right? You spend a year in your 20s, at your peak hotness, doing something nobody ever sees? The unions should have a bone to pick with them over this.
You are going to start seeing contracts stating something along the lines of “If this isn’t released on its normal timeline all rights go to the creators”, just with more legalese obviously.
I wouldnt be surprised if a few lawmakers get pissed about it too and start eliminating the write offs for these type of situations.
This and what’s going on at HBO Max keep making me think of this scene. It doesn’t exactly correspond, but I just keep thinking how suits have the power, creatives really have none.
This is the first I’m hearing of this show, and I am a) a regular TV viewer, including AMC, and b) a regular AV Club reader.
While it does suck to work on a show that never airs, I feel like people are losing sight of the fact that “shot” does not equal “ready to air.” The work that goes into editing and finishing can be pretty massive.So, yeah, this is a massive bummer for the people who worked on the show and enjoyed watching it, but this doesn’t feel the same as what HBO has been up to.