Exclusive: FX president explains the cancellation of Lights Out
After FX announced that it would not be bringing back its freshman drama series Lights Out, fans were no doubt reminded of the situation surrounding Terriers—another smart show that boasted critical acclaim and tons of promise, yet never really seemed to find the audience it needed. As it turns out, FX president John Landgraf recognized those similarities too: “I think what we saw here was [Lights Out] was not, conceptually, something that a broad swath of the audience wanted to watch,” Landgraf said in a phone interview, echoing comments he made during the Terriers postmortem. Like Terriers, Lights Out was a consistent under-performer—showing a steep decline from its lead-in week after week, and scoring an average of around 500,000 adults aged 18-49, which is well below the network’s average of 800,000 in that demographic. (To say nothing of—according to Landgraf—Sons Of Anarchy’s 8 million and Justified’s 7 million viewers, two of the network’s high marks.)
Landgraf continued drawing that parallel between Lights Out and Terriers, saying, “I think they’re both similar in the way that you ask yourself the question of whether you really want a television show that’s very different from anything you’ve seen before—and I mean different in big ways, not small ways. You look at Terriers and you say, ‘Well, that’s a buddy cop show. I’ve seen that before.’ You get into it and you find out that it’s actually subtle and good and special and, in many ways, different from what you’ve seen before. But on its face, it looks pretty much the same. And I’d say the same could be said of Lights Out. It seems vaguely familiar if you’ve seen Rocky or The Fighter. But then you get into it and you find out it’s got richness and texture and it’s quite different. But if your fundamental point of view is ‘I don’t want to see something that I’ve seen before,’ it’s easy to dismiss both those shows on their face, because in a conceptual way, they’re not radically different than other movies and TV shows you’ve seen.”