It’s not uncommon for fans of genre fiction to assemble to try to rescue their favorite shows after their cancellation is announced, but rarely does anything come from these efforts. But we’re living in a new age when people have a wide variety of options of how they choose to consume media. Netflix began the trend of resuscitating older shows when they brought back the sitcoms ‘Arrested Development’ and ‘Full House’ (now called ‘Fuller House’). Now, whenever a show needs saving, rather than trying to get unsupportive networks to reverse their cancellation decisions, after the networks probably didn’t promote the shows that well to begin with, fans are looking toward streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon to throw these programs a life preserver and that’s what happened when Amazon chose to pick up Syfy’s series ‘The Expanse’ when the original network opted not to renew it for a third season.
The fans launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money in order to hire a airplane to circle Amazon’s headquarters, dragging a sign that read “#savetheexpanse.” Amazon’s new studio head, Jennifer Salke described the lengths to which fans of ‘The Expanse’ went to in order to convince the streaming service to pick the show up.
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“There were airplanes circling us, I was having cakes delivered, there was a whole thing happening. And then really smart people, whose opinions I really value creatively, started reaching out to me, saying, ‘have you seen this show, The Expanse, it’s actually great’. I hadn’t so I spent some time, I watched the show and I was like, this show is actually really well done, why is nobody watching it? At the same time, [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos was getting emails from everyone from George R.R. Martin to every captain of industry, like the founder of Craigslist, and they were all writing, saying, ‘there’s this show, it’s so great, you have to see it, you have to buy it or save it’.
“We were trying to explore the deal, and we could make the U.S. deal pretty easily because they were kind of just standing outside, holding it out to us. We had it pretty much done when (Bezos) emailed saying, ‘I’m at an event, a space seminar, I’m looking at the cast of The Expanse here, I would like to get up there and order the show. Can I, can I?’ I was like, let me check with business affairs, and then replied, ‘You can do it, go for it’. It was so fun to watch it on Twitter Live; I could see him do it in real time.
“So, yes, he’s a big fan, and it was fun to be able to support that, not just for him but for all the people that really love that show. (New co-head of TV) Vernon (Sanders) really loved the show, and so he was saying, we can make that show into something. A lot of really smart people said they loved the show, and I actually appreciated it once I looked at it.”
Now, ‘Expanse’ fans, you know what you have to do. If you don’t already have Amazon’s streaming service, you have to get it and stream it. Tell all your friends! Put the same effort used to get Amazon to renew it, to make it worth their investment so that there will be more than one additional season.
Amazon is also in the process of possibly picking up FOX’s cancelled ‘Lucifer’, another show that fans are mourning the loss of. Will it work? That remains to be seen.
Are you a fan of ‘The Expanse’? Are you glad that Amazon salvaged it from the TV scrap heap?
Jax's earliest memory is of watching 'Batman,' followed shortly by a memory of playing Batman & Robin with a friend, which entailed running outside in just their underwear and towels as capes. When adults told them they couldn't run around outside in their underwear, both boys promptly whipped theirs off and ran around in just capes.
