News of the cancellation came through slightly unorthodox channels, as series co-star Colton Dunn broke the news on social media, only for Deadline to get a confirmation of the termination from Netflix. Although we, personally, were not huge fans of the show—in his 2022 review of The Recruit‘s first season, Manuel Betancourt called it out as “not so much a throwback to shows you loved as much as it is a facile facsimile of them”—news of it getting thrown out on the trash heap is still mildly surprising. Per Nielsen’s streaming reports, the series came in overall second place on the second week that its latest season was out, slotting in behind fellow Netflix spy show The Night Agent—not a world-beating position, but still strong. There’s also the fact that Centineo is, like, “A Netflix guy”: As the co-star of the streamer’s To All The Boys rom-com franchise, he came up as one of the only stars the company can really claim for itself.
Certainly, that was the thinking from Hawley just a few weeks ago, when he gave an interview in which it’s pretty clear he was expecting to get a green light on a third season of The Recruit. “We’re waiting for Netflix to officially do their thing with it,” he said in a Deadline conversation in which he spoke about third season plans with an air of a foregone conclusion. “There’s a lot of goodwill inside Netflix towards the show and towards Noah; I think they very much feel like Noah is a homegrown star, which he is. So, I’m feeling super positive about it, as positive as you can feel in this town at this time.” That same interview did acknowledge that the show’s second season got twisted up by the 2023 strikes (hence it arriving three years later, and two episodes shorter, than it was supposed to), but Hawley still sounded supremely confident The Recruit would be coming back.
