HBO decides it might as well cancel South Side while they’re at it
After three seasons, the beloved Chicago-based comedy is coming to an end
Aux News South Side
Perhaps realizing that they hadn’t yet canceled all its shows, HBO finally got around to giving the ax to beloved Chicago-based comedy South Side. It was never the most widely seen show on the platform, as if that mattered, considering Warner Bros. Discovery is canceling shows and movies before they even air. However, South Side established a substantial cult following since debuting on Comedy Central in 2019. The show’s third season hit HBO Max in December 2022. Honestly, it’s surprising that HBO even aired the thing.
“While HBO Max will not be moving forward with a fourth season of South Side, we are so proud of the rich world Bashir Salahuddin, Diallo Riddle and Sultan Salahuddin created,” said an HBO Max spokesperson. “We thank them and Michael Blieden, Tony Hernandez, the supremely talented cast and crew and our partners at MTV Entertainment Studios. For three seasons, this beloved series balanced cutting, hyperlocal social commentary about life on the South Side of Chicago with silly, sometimes zany humor. The result was a wholly unique, ambitious, and fearless comedy that could speak to everyone living the American dream.”
It is a testament to the show that HBO even commented on the cancelation. Most shows are killed off in the dead of night and thrown on a list of potential write-downs for tax season.
In our season three review, writer Quinci LeGardye praised the show:
South Side can be tough to categorize. It’s at once a dual-workplace comedy, an ensemble comedy, and an example of utilizing a setting as an integral character. Now three years removed from its Comedy Central debut, South Side has expanded its reach while still staying true to its roots. R-T-O is still the epicenter (as is the show’s main foursome), but with this latest batch, the series is clearly more comfortable straying out beyond those lines to create something special.
South Side still streams on HBO Max (for now).
18 Comments
seems like the writers might have expected this and threw every wild-ass idea they had into the very funny and fucking insane season 3is IFC still in business? their entire schedule until the weekend is just wall-to-wall reruns of Two and a Half Men, Three’s Company, Everybody Loves Raymond, Scrubs and 3rd Rock From the Suni guess i’m not holding out hope for Sherman’s Showcase season 3
I thought the Incredibly Funny Comedies (IFC) network exclusively ran Parks & Recreation and the comedy about the guy with the goatee who makes “goooooey treats” in an air fryer. Happy to see they’re adding more shows to their roster – that’s a lot of chuckleworthy stuff!
It appears that the basic cable scripted show bubble has burst. Seven or eight years ago, even networks like E!, Bravo and MTV had scripted shows. Now a lot of those shows have migrated over to their parent companies’ streaming services leaving basic cable to show reruns, reality television or reruns of reality television. You can see why people cut the cable.
I think even TNT has given up on original scripted content—they seem to be buying HBO shows to air at the moment—True Blood, for one.
Yup, they even decided not to air the final season of Snowpiercer even though it was already shot. I think the only thing left on TNT is sports like the NBA, NHL and soccer. The other two “T Nets”, TBS and TruTV, have one scripted comedy each, Miracle Workers and Tacoma FD respectively. Miracle Workers was supposed to premiere a few weeks ago, but TBS pulled it at the last minute like they did with the second season of Chad and that was ultimately canceled. Even a network like USA, which had a pretty strong lineup of scripted shows a few years ago, is done to just Chucky and that is also on SyFy.
Most cable networks have taken the completely wrong message from the rise of streaming. They saw people “binge watching” and decided to replicate that experience by just re-running whatever the most popular show they have the rights to is for hours upon hours at a time. That period in which every random, niche cable network decided to pull an AMC (in case you forgot, that network’s first 3 scripted shows ever were Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead) and pump out some prestige dramas was really weird in retrospect. I remember an old co-worker raving about some dumb show they were watching that I later found out aired on WGN America, a network I assumed went off the air sometime in the late ‘90s. And lest we forget Schitt’s Creek originally aired on a reformatted version of the TV Guide Channel.
Good news. Too many blacks on the show.
It’s not beloved. Everybody hates it. I have this on good authority.
This really bums me out, this was up there with I Think You Should Leave as a new show that consistently had my laughing my silly ass off
Ugh stop acquiring things to kill them, dicks.
They saved it. It didn’t get viewership needed. Be happy you got more.
That you, Zaslav?
Nope. I just have a brain.
South Side brought Always Sunny-level energy to everything it did. Truly going to miss it. There have been a lot of shows set in Chicago but few actually have felt genuine. (I loved Good Fight/Wife, but c’mon, Long Island City cannot stand in for Chi Town, and don’t get me started on the weird claustrophobic “Chicago” of The Bear.) As others have said here, South Side is up there with I Think You Should Leave in terms of pure joy + insanity.
This is a brilliant analysis. It absolutely had the unhinged characteristics of the later seasons of Sunny but still grounded in enough reality to stay funny. It was kind of like Atlanta but less surreal and more comedy focused.
why even bother getting invested in shows anymore?
I’m not really even sure if there are a higher percentage of shows getting cancelled than there were in the pre-streaming days. We just have, like, 100x more TV content than we did even 15-20 years ago, so it probably just seems worse based on volume alone. At least shows now usually get to finish out full seasons, a luxury not afforded to many, many shows cancelled in the past.
Why continue to act like more shows die than last long, which has been that way for decades and decades?