Never let it be said that Fox won’t move heaven and earth in order to support projects it truly believes in—or, at least, believes in the syndication potential of a police procedural series with a world-famous Shane Black IP attached. The network has put up with a gob-smackingly vast amount of nonsense from the cast of its three-season cop series Lethal Weapon, from the on-set feuding that led to star Clayne Crawford getting fired from the series after its second year, to Damon Wayans’ increasingly strident claims that he was, in fact, too old for this shit, and would like to stop doing it, please. Through it all, the series has persevered, burning through fan goodwill, Seann William Scott’s precious time, and our own supply of punny headlines based on famous franchise catchphrases in the process. But now it’s finally, finally done.
TVLine confirms that Lethal Weapon is one of several series to get the boot from Fox today, including The Cool Kids and The Passage, none of which, presumably, have been even a quarter of the headache that this particular, kind-of, sort-of well-rated show has been. In a way, we here working on The A.V. Club Newswire Desk will miss Lethal Weapon and its attendant drama, though, in the way one might miss a treasured nemesis; it’s rare to see a TV show in which so many of the people making it are so openly vocal about how much they hate the process of doing it. Rather than mourning, though, let us celebrate the good times, and by that, we mean that one good time, which was when Damon Wayans invited Crawford to “suck this pussy’s dick” while they were arguing on the series’ set, shortly before they reportedly got into an actual, physical fight over these middle school-level taunts.
