First ‘The Dark Tower’ fell, and now another of Stephen King’s properties are fading away as Spike TV has canceled ‘The Mist’ after only one season. To be fair, while the show was picked up straight to series it was never able to pull in half the draw that the 2007 film was able to capture as audiences weren’t thrilled with the acting or pacing. We learned this at the same time that Viacom revealed that the channel is being renamed to Paramount Network.
While Morgan Spector and Frances Conroy were able to pull in 1.2 million viewers during the live-plus-three-day Nielsen viewing, they weren’t able to keep up those numbers by any stretch. Factoring in DVR and the series had problems drawing in 800,000 viewers. In the 18-49 adult range, it wasn’t able to break into the top 30 scripted series which almost shouldn’t be possible on a Stephen King based property.
This was the channel’s first outing into scripted television after canceling both ‘Red Mars’ and ‘Harvest’ which almost makes me wary of what their commitment will look like going forward.
According to Spike’s president Kevin Kay, a second season was only ever in the cards if the first did well. They aren’t turning away from scripted shows though as they’ll soon be airing ‘Yellowstone,’ ‘American Woman,’ ‘Heather,’ and a ‘Waco’ miniseries. However, with ‘The Mist’ and the other previously canceled shows now out of the picture it seems unlikely that we’ll have a new source for genre shows that once appeared to be the case. If this was any indication of the quality of the content though, this news could be for the best.
Are you glad that ‘The Mist’ was canceled or do you think it still had another season of story to tell? Share your thoughts below!
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
