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.
Wolf Pack creator Jeff Davis has said that his new show about teens that are werewolves will have no ties to his prior show Teen Wolf, which was about teens who are werewolves, despite rumors that the new show would be a spin-off. These will be different teens who are werewolves. Sarah Michelle Gellar will be starring in Wolf Pack, but her character will have no ties to the teen who was a monster hunter that she played in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Davis has said his upcoming Teen Wolf film is “basically season seven all in one movie”, though he didn’t comment that the title is no longer very accurate seeing as the teens from the series are no longer teens, though apparently they are still werewolves. Wolf Pack premieres January 26th on Paramount+ and the Teen Wolf movie will premiere that same day on that streamer, enhancing the confusion over the connection between the two.
In cancellation news, Netflix will not be going forward with a second season of its historical mystery 1899 despite the fact that it spent five weeks in that streamer’s Top 10. There’s all kinds of talks about the show not having a good completion rate and stuff, but the real reason is that Netflix just has no commitment to its shows as it continues to churn through originals while quickly tossing the ones that don’t have record-setting viewership numbers. Meanwhile, Syfy finally got around to officially cancelling its monster-hunter dramedy Astrid & Lilly Save the World one year after the show debuted. And AMC Networks continues to go through behind-the-scenes struggles leading to the cancellation of sci fi comedy Demascus while still in production. Expect more shows to fall this year as the Peak TV Bubble appears to be on the verge of busting.
Netflix finally renewed a show this week as they gave the greenlight to a second season of their Addams’ Family reboot Wednesday. It only took having the show top the charts for five weeks in a row (so far) and setting records as the third most-watched original on the service behind Stranger Things Season 4 and Squid Game. If that is the new bar, not many more shows will be getting renewed by that streamer.
Stephen Amell will be returning as Oliver Queen/Green Arrow in one episode of the upcoming final season of The Flash. The fact that Queen died at the end of the Crisis on Infinite Earths event three years ago (Spoiler Alert?) would seem to make his return rather difficult. But death is pretty much like the flu to comic book-based characters, so they will come up with some excuse for him being alive again. It will be Episode 9 of the new season and David Ramsey will also show up as John Diggle/Spartan.
James Gunn is working on a new DC series, but it does not have a title and he is not telling us anything about it at this point. It will allegedly be tied to the new direction of the DC Universe, but it is unclear how he had time to work on this since he has been busy crushing the hopes of many fans by squashing former DCEU plans. He could probably win back some favor by bringing back Legends of Tomorrow for another season and that would be the perfect show to tie together the various DC shows and movies and also launch the new direction. But I am not expecting that to happen anytime soon.
In a holdover from news from last week, George R.R. Martin has announced that the shakeups at Warner Bros. Discovery have led to several of the Game of Thrones spin-offs getting “shelved”. He did not indicate which projects that included, but this had to be expected whether or not the studio was going through behind-the-scenes problems. House of the Dragon performed quite well in viewership, but diminishing returns were bound to set in at some point, and it is unlikely that the many planned spin-offs could have sustained sufficient viewership. So maybe this will free up GRRM’s time to do something like . . . I don’t know . . . finish the dame Song of Ice and Fire books!
In ratings news, Fantasy Island returned for its second season on Monday but only posted a 0.17 rating with 1.7 million total viewers. That is noticeably below the network’s average for this season and it has the show off to a very tenuous start in its second year. This is supposedly a relatively inexpensive series to produce, so maybe that will help it out. But I will be moving this one to Bubble status pretty quickly if the numbers do not improve. More on the streaming and linear ratings for sci fi TV shows at CancelledSciFi.com.
In scheduling announcements, Syfy has set February 1st as the premiere date for its new sci fi series The Ark which comes from the creators of Stargate. They also released the trailer which you can see at the show’s page on this site. Next week brings the highly anticipated premiere of HBO’s post-apocalyptic series The Last of Us which bows on Sunday, January 15th. Also premiering next week are Velma (HBO Max, Thursday) and Servant Season 4 (Apple TV+, Friday). You can see all the premieres for January and beyond at this link and you can keep up with the current schedule at this link.
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.
