It’s been a minute since we’ve had to make the long, lonely trek out to the Friday Night TV Murder Pile: That sad place where networks and streamers dispose of projects in the last 60 seconds before walking out the door for what we presume will be a much better weekend for them than for all the people they just shitcanned. Shows disposed of in this fashion tend to be newer efforts, but CBS went for a veteran this week: R.I.P. Queen Latifah’s The Equalizer, with THR reporting that the show’s fifth-season finale this weekend will now be its final episode.
The series, a reboot of the 1985 show of the same name, starred Latifah as Robyn McCall, a former CIA operative who spends her days as a street vigilante in New York City. (No overt connections to Denzel Washington’s film franchise, also derived from the old series, but producers reportedly held out hopes that they might be able to finagle a crossover one of these days; so much for hopes.) In addition to Latifah, the show also starred Tory Kittles, Adam Goldberg, Liza Lapira, Laya DeLeon Hayes, and Lorraine Toussaint. (Chris Noth also starred in the first two seasons, before his character caught a bad case of “killed in a plane crash off-screen” after he was accused of sexual assault in late 2021.) Somewhat surprisingly for a show that lasted this long—and which even got a failed shot at developing a spin-off, starring Titus Welliver and Juani Feliz—CBS doesn’t appear to have issued any of the standard “We’re proud of the work we did and are sorry to see you go (because we canceled you)” boilerplate for the series, instead letting it pass off the schedule without comment.
The cancellation represents the last question mark left hovering over CBS’s 2024 TV offerings, joining in death two FBI shows, Damon Wayans’ Poppa’s House, and the much-more-eulogized-by-the-bosses Blue Bloods; the network is expected to announce its fall schedule, sans the Queen, next week.
