Of all the days of the week where your TV show could get some news, Fridays are almost always, and by a pretty fair margin, the shittiest. We’ve written many times in this space about the Friday Night TV Murder Pile, where shows get tossed when executives—desperate to not spend their afternoons getting yelled at—toss off a quick “Hey, we’re canceling your show and letting the cast’s options expire” on the way out the door, presumably on the way to something more fun. And the pile is heaped on this particular Friday night, with news that NBC’s Grosse Pointe Garden Society and ABC’s Doctor Odyssey have both met their likely ends.
That “likely,” by the way, is largely on behalf of Doctor Odyssey, since it’s a Ryan Murphy show, and Murphy has a pretty hefty amount of latitude, with a lot of different networks and streamers, to shuffle his many shows around. The series—which starred Joshua Jackson as a cruise ship doctor, solving nautical medical mysteries—has not, technically, been canceled. But ABC has allowed its actors’ contracts to expire, which is generally a death knell for a series, while also stating that the program won’t be on its upcoming schedule. Co-starring Don Johnson, Philipa Soo, and Sean Teale, the series started with strong ratings, and has been bolstered with occasional crossovers from other Murphy shows like 9-1-1. But it ultimately floundered as its only season progressed. It could come back some day, somewhere, but it’ll have to lock its cast back down in order to do so.
In contrast to Grosse Pointe, which is just plain dead. The series, created by Good Girls creators Jenna Bans and Bill Krebs, was the lowest-rated scripted series at NBC at the moment—but well-liked enough by the folks in charge that there was some hope it might get sent over to Peacock, where it could run and play and live a good, long life out in the streaming countryside. But, uh, nuh-uh: NBC execs ultimately decided the series, while apparently pretty cheap to make by streaming TV standards, just wasn’t in the streamer’s existing budget, and wasn’t expected to massively grow its audience in a new home. And so, just like the corpse secreted away by the titular Garden Society in the show’s pilot, the series has now been buried.
[via Deadline]
