Un-Orders are Back Along with “Un-Un-Orders”

It’s time for another edition of my “Renewals and Cancellations” update, so let me open with a rant:

Good Rotten Tomatoes scores do not equal customer interest!

Almost every week, as I collect data on which TV shows got renewed or cancelled, I find headlines, often from clickbait-y websites (many from websites that used to be respectable) about how a “hit show” with a “perfect RT score” or “great reviews” got cancelled.

Well, a “perfect RT” score doesn’t really matter if not enough people watched a show. Viewership matters. Streamers have to convert “interest” into follow-through, otherwise, the interest is useless. (As for “climbing the charts”, it didn’t make any viewership charts I track.)

More to the point, that “interest” probably isn’t real in the first place.

When it comes to customer reviews, IMDb is a better source of data. It literally has 10 or 100 times the number of user reviews. For example…

• The Mandalorian and Grogu has “over 10,000+” reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but there’s no actual number. On IMDb, it has 104K.
• Or look at Dark Matter. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t even provide a number for how many users reviewed it. On IMDb, it has 79K reviews.

The same goes for “The Movie Database”. I just checked Dark Matter and it has 764 reviews. That’s 1,000 times fewer reviews than IMDb. The Mandalorian and Grogu has 1,500. I know that IMDb had some controversies last decade, but Rotten Tomatoes isn’t immune to the same pressure from online trolls. If anything, it’s easier to game that platform since it has fewer user reviews!1

If you want to gauge customer interest, use IMDb!2

What about critical reviews? Well, you should use Metacritic! They have weighted scores, which are so much more accurate than an up or down vote. I’m not sure how Rotten Tomatoes (owned by NBCUniversal, by the way; read David Gross on it) became the industry standard, but I don’t love it. Metacritic is owned by Fandom, i.e., not a movie studio.

Okay, on to the issue!

I probably write this every edition of my “Renewals, Cancellations, Un-Orders and Removals Update” feature, but we’ve got a fascinating set of updates today. A bunch of unpopular shows got renewed, and one popular show got cancelled (which I’m guessing you already know about since I already wrote about it), but most interestingly, I’m going to open with a bunch of shows getting un-ordered, spinoffs, and shows switching streamers.

Plus, a lot of H1 misses showed up! This is a great follow-up to last week’s article and why I track viewership: because it determines if a show continues on or comes to an end. (Just a note, but I cut off finding new shows as of yesterday, 15-Sep. So if something got renewed or cancelled since then, I’ll cover it next issue.)

Let’s dive right in!

Un-Orders: Disney+ Reverses a Big Call

We haven’t seen this in a bit, but we had a very high profile “un-order” this summer: Disney+ cancelled Wonder Man after previously ordering a second season. And despite rumors, there’s no movie in the works.

Wonder Man made the Nielsen charts for one week at 10.3 million hours, which would be great…if the show were coming out weekly. But since Disney put out all the episodes at once, that’s not ideal. I think this image, of comic book shows all-time, tells the story best:

Luminate did their own analysis of this show:

In other news, Disney+ is no longer moving forward with a Power Rangers show, but this one was just in development.

In some good news, let’s talk about an un-cancellation or an un-un-order. Netflix ordered another season of Beauty in Black, despite previously announcing that the show would end after its third season. I love this choice, since this show is a sneaky big hit for Netflix. (We’ll be getting data for the latest season soon.) In fantasy football terms, Beauty in Black is the ultimate “sleeper pick” especially since it cranks out so many episodes each year.

After filming a pilot, HBO Max isn’t moving forward with American Blue—a police procedural that was modeled after The Pitt’s production style, with lots of episodes coming out annually—but they are shopping it around. I love this model, and I know HBO does too, so presumably HBO just didn’t like the quality of the pilot.

Finally, the Pro Bowl is done-zo!!! It says something about this game—which the players and most of the media hate—that it only brought in 2 million viewers, probably the lowest viewership for a nationally televised NFL “game”. Related, HBO is bringing back Hard Knocks, but the show is moving back to the off season.

Shows Switching Streamers or Getting Shopped Around

Some TV shows are switching streamers, which I always find fascinating.

The Circle is leaving Netflix and heading to Hulu. In 2024, I tagged this show as a miss, and I’ll say, I’m not optimistic about its chances on a smaller streamer like Hulu. I checked and it’s produced by Studio Lambert, which is not produced by a Disney-owned company, so that doesn’t explain the move. The new version will have live elements and incorporate fan voting, so if this is a Love Island USA-type play, I like that!

The World Series of Poker is coming back to ESPN! (It’s been on CBS for the last four years.) And Omaha Productions will produce it now. My take is pretty simple, but underrated: ESPN, as a platform for sports, remains unrivaled.

Netflix grabbed a scripted series from Paramount+, The Murder of JonBenet.

Finally, USA ordered a new show, Diplomatic Immunity, which allows me to reiterate my point: USA wasn’t making new shows until they got spun off from NBCUniversal. Competition, i.e more studios, means more productions and more competition.

Spinoffs

Film critics tend to hate spinoffs and reboots, but we’re increasingly seeing IP on TV, though not to the same degree. Here are some of the most notable spinoffs I noticed in the last three months:

• Netflix ordered an Outer Banks spinoff. We’re waiting on results for the latest season, but historically, this show has performed well for Netflix; in 2023, it got over 52 million hours in a week! (The next season’s viewership was far lower.) I’m wondering if this spinoff lowers costs.
• Netflix ordered a Manifest spinoff! I’d say I love this move, except it’s 2026 and the last batch of episodes came out in 2023, though its viewership was way down from the heights of 2021. That’s not a great way to capitalize on the excitement of “Manifest Summer”, which was all the way back in 2021.

• Peacock ordered a Bel-Air spinoff, but that show was never a hit for Peacock despite a lot of PR spin and some coverage in the trades saying otherwise.
• Related, Peacock ordered a new Ted TV show, though the new show takes place after the original films—unlike the Peacock series—and it’s animated now. Though Ted was my choice for Peacock’s “Miss of the Year” for the first half of this year, animating the show (as opposed to creating a CGI character for a half-hour live action comedy) should bring the costs way down. That said, this new show has all the stars from the original: MacFarlane, Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried, and more, and I doubt they come cheap.

Popular Shows That Got Renewed

Okay, on to the regular “Renewals and Cancellations” updates, starting with the nicest category: hit shows that got renewed (because shows with good viewership tend to get renewed).

Peacock renewed Love Island USA, which is a no-brainer, as I just wrote about. It’s the second biggest show of the year and its audience has grown year over year. As Luminate pointed out, it may not maintain these heights next year when it doesn’t have the World Cup to help bolster ratings, but it’s still a monster show. Peacock also renewed The Five-Star Weekend, which lasted for two weeks on the Nielsen charts.

Paramount+ renewed Dutton Ranch, which lasted for nine weeks on the Nielsen charts and racked up 109 million hours, the nineteenth biggest first season of all time.

Paramount+ also renewed Mobland, possibly their biggest non-Taylor Sheridan show.

Prime Video renewed Invincible for a sixth season. While the viewership isn’t sky-high, this show grew its audience this year and I doubt that it costs very much.

On the Netflix front…

• Nemesis is getting a second season, after nabbing over 35 million hours in three weeks according to Nielsen, one of Netflix’s rare bright spots in Q2.
• Netflix renewed The Gentlemen for a third season before its second season came out last week. I like this call to get future seasons out quicker. The first season (which came out over two years ago) opened big, with over fifty million hours in two weeks. We’ll see if it can reverse Netflix’s sophomore slump problem!
• America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is getting a fourth season; the last season was slightly down compared to year’s past.

• The Four Seasons is coming back for a third season. Season two was way down compared to season one, but you could still call this show “popular”. I do like that it’s coming back annually, though. (At least, it did for season two.)

HBO renewed IT: Welcome to Derry. As Deadline noted, this renewal took a long time, allegedly to sort out the creative vision of the show. I called its Nielsen viewership “fine” but its HBO datecdote was on par with shows like Euphoria and Task.

Just last week, I wrote about how Spidey, the star of Spidey and His Amazing Friends, bested all other Spider-Men in terms of viewership. Well, he also bested all of Marvel!

“With nearly 1.3 billion hours streamed on Disney+ globally, the series is Marvel’s most-watched TV series on the platform and the longest-running Spider-Man series overall.”

I feel like almost no one talks about this show, at least not to the same level of a show like, say, Ms. Rachel, when it’s on that level. Anyways, Disney renewed it for another season. Disney needs a “funnel” to get kids excited about their IP/platforms, then continue the relationship as those fans get older. This show is Disney doing that at their best!

Hulu renewed The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives for twenty more episodes. I’m not quite sure this show’s viewership is quite as large as you’d guess from the headlines.

Speaking of surprisingly popular kids shows, Nickelodeon renewed SpongeBob SquarePants for two more seasons and The Patrick Star Show through season seven. As I wrote in my recap of 2025, SpongeBob was the sixth biggest acquired show last year.

Unsurprising Cancellations

Alas, the opposite of popular shows that got renewed are unpopular shows that got cancelled.

Netflix’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is coming to an end after its third season. This show flopped big time in Q2, completely missing the US charts, a big underperformance compared to the first season. Still, someone called it a hit show:

Netflix appears to have quiet-cancelled another sports docu-series. SEC Football: Any Given Saturday. Though both sides left an opening for future seasons, that’s not a great sign. This show was one of my bombs of the year, only peaking on Luminate at 4.1 million hours of viewership. But The New York Times/The Athletic seems unaware that the show didn’t do very well, writing:

“…the show did relatively well. ‘Any Given Saturday’ was in the top 10 percent of Netflix shows in 2025, as judged by its engagement report. It ranked 780th out of about 7,700 titles, drawing 3 million views, per Front Office Sports.”

Three million views? Globally? That’s horrible. Those would be lackluster numbers for just the US.

Really, SEC teams didn’t want to participate in this show due to the conundrum I’ve been writing about for a while now. Since the viewership is so low, the compensation is equally low (The Ankler has estimated $300K to $1 million per episode for a sports docu-series) which means the only compensation is exposure, but that’s risky, as even the writer says:

“Imagine if the cameras were rolling at Ole Miss, chronicling, well, all that. Imagine if they were filming at LSU for the fall of Brian Kelly, firing of its athletic director, intervention of the governor and recruitment of Lane Kiffin.”

Uh, yeah, that’s why the cameras weren’t rolling!