And the entire cast will be Bitsie, intercut with stock footage of Tyler.
Spoilers "Superman & Lois" Season 3
- Thread starter The Realist
- Start date
Well, I'm certainly no fan of WB Discovery's decision-making process, but keep in mind that The CW's superhero shows were always running at a loss. They would've been cancelled much faster under normal circumstances, but there were special conditions like the deal with Netflix and the re-airings on The CW's website that made the shows profitable for the company overall even though they weren't profitable from broadcast alone. The reason they've nearly all been cancelled is because the new regime changed things to a more conventional set of standards for profitability -- one that, evidently, even S&L struggles to meet.
True. It's not as good as the first two seasons. It's...way better.
(obviously, tastes vary from person to person, but I couldn't resist)
Same thing happened with AMC and Walking Dead, after the massive success of season one they...fired the showrunner, threw out all his scripts and canceled nearly all the lingering plots he'd set up, halved the budget and demanded twice as many episodes.
The Eureka guy walked away when NBC cut its budget. He said the show couldn't be done on the reduced budget. The show ended not because of bad ratings but the the network didn't want to spend.
Check out Supernatural. You can definitely see a much lower budget in later seasons.
With my history with CW, I actually only watched the last two episodes of the season and have been waffling about seeing the rest.
But you don't cancel the show that's coming closest to meeting those conditions. Again it's their most watched show on the network. If the network itself is that unprofitable why are they bothering to continue with the CW at all?
I wasn't talking about cancellation. I was addressing thribs' question of why they cut the budget for the fourth season if it was their most profitable show. My point is that it was only profitable relative to the other shows that were produced at a loss. Under the new standards, it's only borderline. "Coming closest" may save a show from cancellation, but only if the budget is cut to compensate for the shortfall in ratings.
As I said, the new owners are evidently attempting to reorient the network toward programming that they think will be more profitable, e.g. "reality" stuff. S&L did well enough that it's one of the few scripted shows they've bothered to keep, but only at a reduced budget and with the likelihood that this is its final season. We're still in the transitional period between what The CW was and what they're turning it into, so it's too early to say what they'll do with it in the long term, which might well include discontinuing it if they can't get it to turn a profit. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened, but they're not there yet.
Lower budgets is why some of my favorite SciFi shows decided to shutdown. I'm currently watching the Invisible Man that came out in 2000. It got canceled because of budget constraints, not ratings. The guy running Eureka shut that show down because the network wanted him to produce it for less money per episodes.
I agree with you. Might be seeing a resurgence of reality TV in the future. However, times are different with so much streaming. I'm seeing Paramount+ stuff hit Amazon Prime. I'm seeing HBO/MAX stuff hit Netflix. And I'm now seeing AMC+ stuff on MAX. Lots of consolidation and/or sharing of content. This is new. Feels like an unwind of the streaming wars with more licensing.
According to Variety, the fourth season of Superman and Lois won't air until the summer of 2024 at the earliest due to the ongoing writers/actors strike.
Would not be shocked if it joins the list of shows to be retroactively cancelled.
It would not be the first time that's happened to a TV series. I would not bet on the show returning at all, especially with the truncated 4th season bumped to the middle of next year. If it had the pull of Stranger Things (long delayed final season still coming), perhaps the CW would keep the series on for a full season's worth of episodes, but...
But that would leave then without a show to fill the time slot for longer because a new show will take longer to spin up and still face the same problems as Superman and Lois.
Good point. Assuming the studios ever cave and end the strike, they'll want to get back into production as soon as possible, so they'll rely on the shows they already have contracted. Presumably production, or at least pre-production, was already underway on season 4 when the strike began, so they'd want to resume that right away.
Unless, of course, they replace it with something much cheaper to make and quicker to produce (see any asinine reality show).
Well I'll never know because my local CW station was one of those stations that was sold off in the sale of the network. Now they air Family Feud from 8-9pm and reruns of 48 hours from 9-10pm.
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