Netflix handed down a couple of first-season cancellations tonight, ensuring that two of its freshman shows will now go in the dustbin of history—or, if you want to get even more obscure, “the dustbin of TV shows that were only on Netflix for a single season and will never be shown to anyone by the algorithm ever again.” Specifically, Deadline reports that the streamer has dropped the axe on its stab at the resurgent medical drama genre, Pulse, and Shondaland’s quirky “What if Giancarlo Esposito got murdered at the White House?” series The Residence.
Of the two, we’re far more sad to lose Pulse, which may not have been The Pitt or anything, but was at least serving up some soapy medical drama that didn’t skimp on the drama part of the equation. The series, created by Zoe Robyn, starred Willa Fitzgerald and Colin Woodell as residents working in a Miami Hospital. Reviewing the series when it debuted what will now be its only ten-episode season back in early April, our own Saloni Gajjar wrote that, “Under the guise of a fast-paced procedural is a provocative dissection of toxic workplace romances and the intersection of ambition and love.”
The Residence, meanwhile, was just kind of a mess, attempting to riff on Only Murders In The Building murder-comedy vibes without half the Hulu show’s fleetness, and forcing star Uzo Aduba to output near-toxic levels of quirk as the hyper-intelligent detective brought in to solve a murder that everyone involved wants quietly hushed up. Despite a few fun casting touches—including the ever-excellent Isiah Whitlock Jr. as the police chief who backs “Cordelia Cupp” every step of the way—the series will not come back for another season of solving a murder in some other extremely unlikely locale. Deadline suggests that the show got screwed, in part, by timing: It doesn’t look great when your star-studded, lavishly expensive comedy gets completely overshadowed by the one-week-earlier release of a show like Adolescence, which crafted a far more mature and compelling narrative out of the tropes of the “murder mystery,” and on what was almost certainly a fraction of the budget.
Netflix has been pretty generous with freshman series renewals lately, having handed down new seasons of Man On The Inside, Running Point, The Four Seasons, Beauty In Black, Forever, North Of North, Bet, and Ransom County. But no luck for these two—or black comedy anthology series No Good Deed, which hasn’t been canceled, but which also hasn’t been given a new season, and is instead just sort of being kept in a “We’re not making any more of this one” void.
