Sci Fi TV Week in Review: Johnny Jay’s irreverent, snarky, and caffeine-fueled look back at the past week in sci fi TV in five minutes or less.
Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy, who created The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and more, will be leaving Netflix and signing a multi-year development deal with Amazon’s Prime Video. Flanagan and Macy released the following statement about the move:
Amazon is a studio that we have long admired. Their commitment to engaging in groundbreaking series and content aligns with the ethos of what we have built at Intrepid. We are looking forward to working with the entire Amazon team as we bring our brand of genre productions to the service and audiences around the globe.
Of course, the fact that Netflix just cancelled The Midnight Club and had previously decided not to continue the season-long horror anthology The Haunting beyond its second year–despite critical acclaim–may have had something to do with why the creators jumped ship. Their adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher is still set for a 2023 release on Netflix, but afterwards they will be haunting Prime Video.
As mentioned above, the Netfix Red Queen announced her “Off With Their Heads!” verdict this week and The Midnight Club was cancelled after one season. That show spent three weeks in the Netflix Top 10 and three weeks in the Nielsen Streaming Rankings, but that was not enough to earn the show a second season. One might think that the cancellation was a punishment for Flanagan and Macy leaving the streamer, but plenty of other shows have been cancelled by Netflix with similar viewership numbers (mostly recently Fate: The Winx Saga and The Imperfects). It seems more likely that the creators tried to distance themselves from a streamer known for quick cancellations. Flanagan expressed his disappointment with Netflix for cancelling the show in a recent blog post and he also revealed what would have happened in the second season. There is no word on whether they will try to get the property moved to Prime Video, but Netflix likely holds the rights for a minimum of two years.
In development news, the legal drama Judgement from Joey Falco (Charmed, Sleepy Hollow) has been picked up by ABC and may be of interest to genre fans. It will follow two timelines, one in 2023 and another fifteen years later when a woman being vetted for a Supreme Court seat recounts her experience at a prominent D.C. law firm. It sounds like this one will go heavy on the soap opera angle, so it is unclear if it will have much in the way of genre elements.
Over at FX, a pilot has been ordered for The Trenches which comes from Daredevil executive producer Drew Goddard. That will be an animated comedy that follows a family of monster hunters and is not to be confused with The CW’s long-running Supernatural about two monster hunters nor its prequel series The Winchesters about the parents of those monster hunters who are also monster hunters nor the long-running animated comedy Scooby Doo about monster hunters who also happened to make an appearance on one episode of Supernatural. FX will likely be looking to add The Trenches to its slate of originals at some point in 2023.
And on the subject of animation, Warner Bros. Television is on the verge of closing a deal with Prime Video involving DC-branded content. HBO Max cancelled quite a number of animated projects when the merge of Warner Bros. and Discovery happened (which included casting Final Space to oblivion), and now some of those projects could shift to Prime Video. Whether that would include such shows as Bruce Timm’s Batman: Caped Crusader–a direct continuation of Batman: The Animated Series–remains to be seen. But in any case, score this as another win for Prime Video this week.
In casting news, Mark Strong will be joining the cast of HBO Max’s Dune: Sisterhood as The Emperor while Jade Anouka has been cast as Sister Theodosia and Chris Mason has been cast as Keiran Atreides. Over at Disney+, Michael Gandolfini will be joining the cast of Daredevil: Born Again in an unspecified role. Also, a key character has been recast in the upcoming second season of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. (Spoiler Alert, I guess.) Joseph Mawle will be departing from the role of Orc leader Adar and will be replaced by Sam Hazeldine.
In streaming viewership, Netflix’s new Addams’ Family reboot Wednesday set a viewership record in its first week of release. That show pulled in 341 million hours of viewing which was a one-week record for an English Language show on that service. But will that assure it a second season? That’s a conversation that must be had with the Netflix Red Queen. More on the streaming and linear ratings for sci fi TV shows at CancelledSciFi.com.
Next week brings the premiere of the fourth season of Doom Patrol on HBO Max. It will release two episodes on Thursday and one ep per week after that. Its fourth season will be broken into two parts of six episodes each with the second part airing in 2023. Also next week, the fourth season of Netflix’s animated fantasy The Dragon Prince will arrive on Friday with all episodes available for viewing. That one is not to be confused with the streamer’s upcoming animated fantasy Dragon Age: Absolution nor its other active animated fantasy DOTA: Dragon’s Blood nor its cancelled animated fantasy Dragon’s Dogma. You can see the premieres for December and beyond at this link and you can see the Weekly Listings here.
Be sure to keep up with the news during the week with This Week in Sci Fi TV and r/SciFiTV.
SciFiTVSite.com: Follow our Sci Fi TV Schedule for all the currently airing and upcoming sci fi and fantasy television shows, and you can see the premieres for all the upcoming genre entries at this link.
CancelledSciFi.com: Keep up with the status updates of all the currently airing sci fi and fantasy shows with our Cancellation Watch posts. And be sure to follow the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site for breaking news and updates.
