I feel a lot has happened this week in television. Or maybe there’s just a lot going on with the television I keep up with. Whatever, let’s talk about it:
The biggest headline by far was Fox’s cancellation of fan darling Brooklyn Nine Nine, an action-sitcom about the shenanigans of New York City’s 99th police precinct. Don’t worry, NBC picked it a day later.
Despite being a show about cops, it’s been sensitive to the current events of the day with an episode about the police’s public image in season 2 and an episode about racial profiling in season 5. The characters themselves are wholesome, diverse and well-written. Each has so much personality that it’s hard for me to pick a definite favorite (Sargent Terry Jeffers? Gina Linetti? Captain Raymond Holt? It’s so hard to pick!)
Multiple celebrities, including Mark Hamill (Star Wars, Batman The Animated Series), took to Twitter to express their disappointment at B99’s cancellation. According to Entertainment Weekly, NBC has been keeping close tabs on the show for a while now.
B99 ran for five season on Fox and will have a sixth, 13-episode season on NBC. No word yet on whether this sixth season will be the last.
NINE NINE!
It was a big week for announcements as Syfy also announced that The Expanse’s third season will be its last.
Based off the widely-read and much-loved novels by James S.A. Corey, The Expanse is a critically-acclaimed space opera about the conspiracies behind a mysterious alien substance. Riding the coattails of B99’s renewal, fans of The Expanse are campaigning hard for Amazon to pick up the broadcasting rights for the show with a change.org petition and calling for fans to write to Jeff Bezos.
They even hired an airplane to fly a # SAVE THE EXPANSE banner by Amazon’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., Monday.
That airplane thing is what got me. If I were in charge of television production at Amazon Prime studios, I’d have gone straight to Bezos and been all “These welwatas flew an airplane so we can save their TV show. I think we owe them. Here is the documentation to get it done, sa sa?”
When the campaign started, it split its focus between Netflix and Amazon. Netflix has the international streaming rights for The Expanse, where it is billed as a Netflix Original everywhere but the U.S. Amazon, meanwhile, has the streaming rights for North America. Netflix declined the offer to purchase it, so now the focus of the campaign is on Amazon.
Finally, The 100 is back on The CW. If you’re into super-dramatized post-apocalypses where everyone is way too into killing each other, this is the show for you. (Dare I say it? I dare: I think The 100 is better than The Walking Dead. THERE I SAID IT.)
Stunt coordinator Clay Virtue was honored in the latest episode, which aired Tuesday.
I didn’t know who that was, so I did some digging. Though Virtue didn’t work on The 100, he was involved in some big Hollywood titles like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Total Recall. He died suddenly in October 2017. His brother, Marshall, is a stunt coordinator for The 100.
Heavy did a nice write-up of Clay, which is where I got my information.
That’s it for today. Like what you read? Let me know in the comments.
Leave a Reply