Bates Motel just wrapped up its five-season run on A&E a few days ago, but unlike Norman Bates himself, the network has no interest in holding onto a mummified corpse it doesn’t have any use for. In A&E’s case, though, the mummified corpse is actually scripted television in general: According to Deadline, it’s completely abandoning scripted shows in favor of nonfiction programming. Bates Motel was the only scripted show to premiere on A&E since 2013 that lasted more than a single season, with older hits The Glades and Longmire having already been canceled a few years back (though the latter has continued on Netflix since then).
Meanwhile, A&E’s newer reality shows like 60 Days In, Leah Remini: Scientology And The Aftermath, and Live PD have been blowing up, so the network has decided to stop trying to make scripted shows work and just embrace what is already working. Plus, A&E has a whole bunch of murder shows on its schedule, and if it doesn’t watch its back, Investigation Discovery is going to swoop in and take over the entire murder-show genre.